With 2019 most definitely underway, I wanted to pause for a moment to lay out general plans and content priorities for the upcoming year.
Obviously things are ultimately subject to change, but it’s likely that at least most of the outline will be followed loosely over the next 11-and-change months. Things are broken down by content-type, and then by game/category.
Written Content
For now I’m content (haha) with the current once-a-month cadence of article releases as a baseline, with room to move to once-per-fortnight at times when I have more to publish.
Here’s a few topics I hope to have written articles for this year:
League of Legends
- Olaf guide (on Mobafire) – complete rewrite and reformat, with a hopeful January deadline that gives me three more weeks to finish up as of this post. For those unfamiliar, the below quotes are just some of the praise this guide received over on LolKing when it was published there (but the site shutdown in late 2018). There’s a pretty high expectation here, and I want to meet it.
- “Good now, bad later: why some item purchases seem good but actually suck”
- Olaf-focused split-pushing supplement to Olaf guide, although I may try to do this in video form instead. Ideally I would like to have it in both forms, but the time to do each (and keep them maintained after any major changes) would be not insignificant.
- Some ARAM tips and build advice I’ve learnt as a +200 games positive ARAM player myself.
- Worlds 2019: each year there’s usually at least one thing which piques my interest enough to investigate in more depth, so no doubt something will pop up when the time comes. Past topics have generally been item-focused, such as Avarice Blade at Worlds 2015 (available to Patrons as part of the Document Cache) and Sterak’s Gage at Worlds 2018.
Rainbow Six Siege
- How angles work in Siege – this would probably be a bit on the basic side, but I still see players mistakes about their choice of angle all the time, so basic wouldn’t mean not-useful in this case.
- Safely clearing rooms, pushing and droning – this would need a lot of supporting visuals to fully explain everything but is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while since it’s such an important concept for successfully attacking but relatively few players seem to learn it just by playing the game.
- MAYBE: a shorter article quickly looking at when it’s worthwhile to swap to a secondary weapon beyond the most obviously “I’m out of ammo on my primary but need to fight immediately”. I would need to find a way to make this a relatively cohesive pile of words before working on more than the basic outline I have so far.
Rise of Nations
With Don gone (RIP ;_;) it’s hard to spend as much time on RoN as I used to, since I now have no regular sparring partner and have yet to successfully find another 🙁 Nonetheless there’s a few articles I’ve had mapped out since last year which deserve to be published even if I eventually stop regularly writing about RoN.
- Economy part 4 (enhancement / amplifier buildings) – I’ve been trying to get this out since PAX but it’s just never come together despite spending quite a bit of time wrangling it, so it’s been holding up part 5 as well as the lead-in articles which prompted me to start the whole economy series in the first place. If it comes down to it, I’d rather publish a “cop-out” article that is almost entirely links to the wiki if it means I get it out the door so that its prerequisite-ness is out of the way.
- Economy part 5 (farms vs granaries and other stuff like that).
- Economic growth and military production (the relationship between the two, prioritising which when etc)
- MAYBE: scouts and spies (similar to the generals and patriots article).
Tech
- Systems I’ve built (cont) – I released the first one of these a while back but have had trouble with following up on it. A few people just never got back to be me with the questions, so at this point I’m looking to just publish without. There’s also a couple more builds to add into the mix now, and more recent builds are probably more interesting.
- 100 hours in hell: getting my new ryzen system to not constantly crash and freeze – I really did spend around 100 hours just getting this thing working, and it might be fun for a few readers to follow along the journey I took.
- MAYBE: system guide / parts guides – this was one of the things I had really wanted to do early on, but the time to maintain this information over time is an exceptional time sink that’s super difficult to justify given that my readerbase currently has not given feedback for more of this type of content (other content sources already do a decent job of this, just not with Australian context).
Video Content
Stream
Starting an off-stream playthrough of Oblivion may have been a temporarily fatal mistake to any kind of regular streaming, but nonetheless I’d like to get through a few games on stream during this year.
- The Talos Principle was given to me by an old friend for Christmas, and I figure playing through it on stream could be interesting given that I know nearly nothing about the game going into it other than it’s considered good.
- MechWarrior 4 Vengeance, MechWarrior 4 Black Knight, and MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries are still queued up from last year, but since I’m on a new system I’ll need to make sure they actually work. Worst case scenario I actually have my old OS backed up and can probably use that to play through these if I need to. I’ll likely put a break between at least the first two and the last, but doing Vengeance straight into Black Knight will show off a few amusing discrepancies in what’s supposed to the sequel-expansion of sorts.
- Batman: Arkham City (GOTY) came from one of the many raffles on Red’s server around Christmas (thanks TrustyJAID!) and could also be fun to play through on stream.
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012) was intended to played through as a followup to the 1994 version which I started with, slotting in after the MW4 games (or at least after the first two)
- XCOM 2 should slot in nicely sometime after the first XCOM-remake and I’ve never played it before so I’ll have to learn everything while everyone judges me.
- Solo queue League of Legends is still something I’d prefer not to stream right now since I find streaming to be pretty distracting from fully focusing on the game in front of me. I’m open to streaming ARAMs / Nexus Blitz etc but I don’t think that would be that interesting to watch.
- Rainbow Six Siege is something I actually would like to stream a bit of, but I discovered that after upgrading my CPU I became GPU-bound in Siege and drop a lot of frames due to rendering (not encoding) lag if I record my gameplay without switching vsync on (which introduces a bit of input lag). If I get a meaningful GPU upgrade at some point this year (plausible, but not expected), I’ll revisit streaming this.
YouTube (main channel)
My main channel will continue to focus on League of Legends for now, since that’s really what people are subbed there for. Anything else will currently go to my second channel.
- Matchup VoDs are something I’ve wanted to increase in regularity for years, so I don’t want to say that “this year is the year” as an empty promise. I’d like to return to one almost every Monday (which is a schedule I’ve had in the past, but not been able to maintain long-term thus far), so we’ll see how we go.
- Gameplay clips on my main channel are something I’m not sold on, since I don’t think I can compete with other people purely on entertainment value, and I don’t have the time and energy to focus on more than one or two low-popularity content pieces at a time in addition to more popular stuff.
- “Tips and tricks” / guide style informative videos I hope to do a few of these this year, given I can now record and edit with much less friction thanks to increased CPU power. If I feel able to, I’d love to get a condensed video-version of my Olaf guide done further down the track, and split into chunks so that it’s easy to update when major changes happen. Written guide first though!
YouTube (second channel)
- Stream VoDs should look a bunch nicer moving forward because I now have enough CPU-grunt to record in higher quality while simultaneously streaming at stream quality.
- Now and then I’ll probably put up a few misc videos similar to Olaf at Level 1 so that I have an avenue to practise my editing once again.
Other Stuff
LoL Tutoring
Last year I was actually tasked with helping with some (paid!) League of Legends tutoring, with a focus on in-person lessons to differentiate with the plethora of existing online-based options. Material I make for this likely won’t be explicitly available unless you’re taking the course, but there’ll probably be some amount of crossover with other stuff I release publicly. For example if I put together some stuff for split-pushing for the course, I can also put together a separate piece of content publicly and draw from same stuff I used to make the course-material.
Currently I don’t expect this to have much impact on my existing content output, although I might have be more choosy when working on niche content.
Email Newsletter Thing?
I know not everybody uses Discord or social media, and even those who do may not always see when new stuff is posted. At some point later down the track I’m thinking of setting up some kind of once-a-week opt-in newsletter that just links to everything I’ve put out that week. Obviously this only makes sense whenever I have a regular cadence of content coming out, which has historically been quite hit and miss.
Earliest would likely be late 2019 or later.
Music (Piano!)
Although I believe all my current Patrons have had exposure to my piano-playing, I haven’t publicly released anything on YouTube / social media. At some point I’d like to, or at least add some extra bonus content for my $5+ Patrons who really help keep things running.
I learn mostly game music (examples so far include LoL, Minecraft, DDLC, Starcraft, Undertale) or whatever else tickles my fancy (I know some Bo Burnham :D!), so hopefully that’s something people would enjoy seeing.
Discord / Twitter / Facebook / Instagram
Discord conversation has mostly been driven by having other people actively talking, of which there are currently few. That’s totally fine, and hopefully over time more people will trickle in and the place will become moderately lively. I’m here to build content more than a separate community, so if the Discord server isn’t exactly bustling that’s not a problem in my book.
Those with questions can still contact me there or via email and get a fairly prompt reply.
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram (links at the bottom of all pages on this site) will continue to have roughly the same stuff posted which they currently do i.e.:
- Content announcements and updates + random day-to-day stuff on Twitter.
- A fairly “formal” approach on Facebook with mostly content announcements.
- Lots of rabbit pics on Instagram, plus whatever else is interesting to put up (e.g. computer stuff, a bit of food, a bit of PAX highlights).
So that’s it for this year’s rough roadmap. If you have any questions feel free to hop over to the Discord server and ask away. For those looking to support me putting out helpful and/or entertaining content so that afford frivolous expenditures like public transport and food can check out my Donate page – and thank you!