Tag Archives: youtube

Pixelberry Wants a Writing Assessment!

Posted by aabicus on

Just got my first writing job application that wants to move forward! Pixelberry has asked for a writing assessment to see if I can move onto the interview stage. This is super cool, and I’ve taken the day off school so I can fully focus on it.

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I like the artstyle, and I can definitely do this sort of writing, though I hope they assign me to the sci-fi/supernatural/fantasy/not-just-high-school settings. The “every good option is locked behind a premium currency” business model is super frustrating but I bet it makes a fortune

I’ve kinda taken everything else off too, just to send out job applications fulltime. I repurposed my old C++ learning story into an all-purpose story for working on things in the third-person, and it’s got a pretty cute spreadsheet tracking my job applications and their status.

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I’ve kinda let my YouTube channel fall by the wayside as I sort this stuff out, but it’ll be there when I get back. My viewers almost exclusively come from my reddit threads, so this might actually be a chance to test whether a brief hiatus even hurts my numbers. Itch.io’s been sitting barren since February, but I’m pretty happy with the game selection already on there tbh.

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Just broke my 200th download on itch.io, which is genuinely cool. It warms my heart to check every few days and see a handful of people have downloaded stuff. Almost all of the hits are from TV Tropes, since I wrote full pages for Gamer 2, Find the Cure!, and Oedipus in my Inventory. Any of my future creative content will get its own page no questions asked, it’s great for building steady (if minor) traffic. My Clickteam Fusion tutorials and C++ Projects are steady hitmakers too, the latter of which I don’t really understand but I’m not complaining.

I can’t help but be a little worried overall. Literally no other job I’ve applied to has even written me a rejection letter, so if Pixelberry doesn’t work out I may not have a lot of options going forward. One safety net is that I’m in the running for their Senior Writer position, and if they say no, I can ask if there’s any chance I can downgrade to their Junior Writer position. I mean, you never know.

Update on Things

Posted by aabicus on

This might not be my most coherent blog post since I didn’t sleep last night, but at least I spent it being productive, right?

The first big thing that happened was that my article scored the second-to-top comment in a reddit thread dedicated to an insane play performed by the LA Gladiators during the Overwatch League playoffs. A blog called Daily eSports contacted me and asked if I wanted to start writing articles for them at a rate of $1 per 100 words. I agreed mostly because they said I’d get to work with an editor and use their SEO tools, two things I’ve been meaning to get more practice with, things that would teach me valuable skills to making my content marketable. It’s a little depressing because the SEO tools were like “please replace every single interesting word with the most generic synonym” and the readability tool was like “Every sentence over 20 words is too short”. I mean, I assume they’re right since they were literally designed to attract people, but I like my $10 vocab words ;~; But I’ve already written my first article for them, which is officially the first online article I’ve ever been paid to write.

I’ve been strongly considering making a Patreon for my YouTube channel, maybe start getting some pocket change for that pastime too. It’s still humming along, nothing but the Payday videos are getting hits but I expected that when I decided to invest into a single franchise. The only Fortnite video I’ve made is maintaining a steady climb of new viewers despite me phoning in marketing, so I’ll probably more of those. I decided to do my Fortnite vids with a Scottish accent just because I need some way to enjoy myself, the game itself certainly isn’t doing it.

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Right: Before aabicus learned Photoshop. Left: After aabicus started learning Photoshop

Look at how goddamn gorgeous those thumbnails on the left are. Sure, they’re not Rembrandt, but they actually qualify as YouTube-worthy thumbnail quality. I’ve finally finally started Photoshop, and I’ve recently passed the threshold where I know enough that it’s just fun and awesome and I look forward to making the thumbnail instead of dreading it. Photoshop is a goddamn miracle and it blows my mind what I’ve been able to accomplish with next to no effort. This makes me really happy because I’ve wanted to know Photoshop for years, but I’ve always put it off because the initial hurdle felt too daunting. That leaves Unity as the one looming beast I’ve never managed to tame. Have made no progress on that front.

Kinda related segue, my new school project is to make a Mixer game with 3 other students (Tyler from Zone Out, Akshay, and Wong). Mixer is Microsoft’s attempt to beat Twitch at their own game and, following their failure to do so, rebrand itself as the leading avenue for crowdplay games (the genre Twitch Plays Pokemon invented). To their credit, they have done a great job of that and there are a bunch of thriving crowdplay games on the channel. Our job is to make one more.

My job specifically is to write the design document and create a mockup in Clickteam Fusion for playtesting purposes. The design document is a work in progress and the school’s private Google Drive is a real twip about sharing stuff outside network, but you can see the mockup via this secret itch.io URL. That’s never going live anywhere else, so consider it a thanks for reading this blog. Hopefully it’s more user-friendly than Hurdles.

More Exciting YouTube Happenstances

Posted by aabicus on

Last time I used this title I wrote about YouTube, programming and LinkedIn. I have more updates on two of those fronts.

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Believe it or not, lowered viewer duration is a good thing when the decision that launched your viewerbase is “my videos do not exceed two minutes”

The YouTube channel is exceeding all my expectations, with a huge boost in subscribers, comments, and views ever since I switched to a Tuesday/Friday schedule and started aggressively promoting it on social media. My main goal right now is to keep this momentum (or, at worse, maintain my current viewerbase) until Overkill releases Overkill’s The Walking Dead, and try to get my foot in that door on the ground floor. Best case scenario for me is that the game has an initially disappointing response, but Overkill saves it through consistent hard work and frequent patches (which is what happened with Payday 2 and RAID WWII, so odds are good that’s how it’s going to pan out). Runner-up situation is that the game is just straight good from the word go, but that’ll mean I have a lot more competition (like what happened to me with Overwatch.) Either way, I’m just super happy that after two years of releasing videos, they’ve finally started gaining traction.

In other news, the newest C++ assignment was kicking my ass until I spoke to the professor. It’s called “the flocking assignment” because it involves creating a bunch of birds (aka triangles) that chill in a big cloud and disperse with the press of buttons. It’s another SFML assignment and even the actual programmers are having trouble with it. After about ten hours with the tutors last weekend, I finally just spoke to the professor because I wanted to work on my final exam instead of this. He crunched the numbers, and I can still pass the class even if I get a zero because I’ve turned every other assignment in, so thank god. I’ll still probably turn in what I got for partial credit. Looking forward to the final project, by the way, its a Clickteam Fusion assignment where the player fights enemies in a procedurally-generated environment by grabbing procedural-generated weapons. Or at least that’s the goal. At the moment I’m still working on the procedural-generated environment. Should have more to report later.

Exciting YouTube Happenstances

Posted by aabicus on

Couple of cool things happening on my other social medias:

1. The SPUF of Legend hit its 100th subscriber, which means I finally qualify for a custom URL: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheSPUFofLegend Turns out they actually don’t let you choose that custom URL, you just hit the ‘Enable custom URL’ button and it turns your channel name into a hyperlink. But it’s still lightyears better than that cavalcade of letters and numbers you get by default!

2. Several videos on there are doing surprisingly well! The most notable of which are two presentations which are literally just recordings of lectures I gave for classes at school: Team Fortress Classic: Its Development, Gameplay, and Legacy, and Procedural Content Generation in Left 4 Dead 2. Both of them got triple-digit viewcounts within their first week, and the tie-in reddit threads quickly hit the top of their related subreddits. r/l4d2 even stickied it ^_^ I actually plan to start doing “lectures turned into videos” that are just me talking with a PowerPoint running in the background. God knows they were easier to make than the gameplay-synced-to-voiceovers I normally make.

3. This one isn’t YouTube, but I also scored a killer custom URL on LinkedIn. This time I actually had to type stuff until I found one available, and it blew my mind that my full first and last name were just available. Those other Nicholas Halseys were really sleeping on the job, I don’t know how we got all the way to 2018 without any of us snatching it up.

4. And, as we stray further and further from the point of this post, have an unfinished story where Flora learns C++. It was a failed attempt by me to approach C++ through another lens, to try and view it objectively instead of from the usual ‘oh god I don’t get any of this I’m doomed‘ purview that tends to prevail. With Destler’s class over, I have literally no motivation to ever touch this story again. But who knows, supposedly Whitehead’s class is putting C++ back on the menu, so Flora might be voiding more functions yet.

Edit 9/9/2019: I literally platinum’d someone on reddit to finish the code, so the story is now officially finished. In my defense, I’m long graduated by the time I posted this update.

 

STAR_’s and Bars

Posted by aabicus on

I feel really bad for star these days. He’s a huge inspiration to me and the first Youtuber I ever got addicted to, and a lot of what I’ve accomplished was because he provided the spark. But he seems really sad in his streams, and it shows in the videos he uploads. I don’t think he’d even read a message were I to send it, he probably gets loads due to his hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but I hope he’s doing better than it seems and things improve for him.

Things aren’t doing great over here either. It’s been pretty hard to motivate myself to write. Projects are backlogging themselves, my exercise bike rides are the only daily goal I’ve been able to commit to, and my work starts up again tomorrow at 8:30am.

So this blog post is basically one of those lame apology ones that content creators do when they’re aware of how little they’ve output recently but don’t actually have content to make up for it. I have a job interview with Blizzard in two days, I think I’ve got a pretty good shot of making their Overwatch customer service team, which would literally be a godsend because it’s my current favorite game of choice. Overwatch is basically Team Fortress 3, or as close as we’re ever going to get, so I’d be ecstatic if I made it into even a small part of that franchise. One day I might be able to work my way up to QA testing for them.

A reminder that I’m still cranking out daily articles on The Daily SPUF, it’s a blog kinda like this one except the content is publish-worthy and publicized over there. Otherwise, I’ve made progress on one of my Clickteam Fusion games and it should be coming out in maybe a month, god willing. Haven’t really told any of you anything about it but it’s a 4-level platformer where I practice creating cutscenes, reactive AI, and a Sonic-style ring system for taking damage.

EDIT: ended up sending a message anyway. It’s always worthwhile to thank someone who’s made a difference in your life