Just sharing my little COVID19 Quarantine Lockdown project.
Sharing this here might not make a lot of sense seeing as you folks won’t understand my commentary because I used my native tongue on this series. I decided to use my native tongue instead of using English even though I am a bit fluent with it because I was inspired by Let’s Players who do Let’s Plays in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish I often come across on Youtube. Also a lot of people from my country who are on Youtube often make videos using English. As far as I know I’m currently the only one who made a Let’s Play using Filipino. Also most people here are only interested in crap Freemium mobile games, MOBAs on PC or First Person Shooters. Only a handful even know of Steam. And those that do are only familiar with the platform because of either DOTA 2 or Counter Strike. Games like XCOM are literally alien territory for most Filipinos. I’ve restricted my audience to a paltry handful yes, but at least I am doing something new and I wholeheartedly am interested in
I’m not sure on how much you’ve done so far on your channel but it’s at least something to do and more than what I’ve done. My real guess upon why people would prefer to play mobile games there as opposed to PC or console games is due to cost: XCOM ain’t cheap that’s for sure, the genre is obscure and not as appealing and easy to understand, marketable and etc. to different markets. I reside in an Asian country but even here from what i can tell is a mix: many play and are more familiar to PC games but its the usual like (as you pointed out) Dota 2 and Counter Strike. For mobile games they usually play PUBG, Mobile Legends and I think I see an audience for COD as well. Console is something like Tekken 7 and the FIFA games. Then again, I don’t really interact with mines all too often so it might be different, but you get the point. Obviously not everyone plays those games only, that’s silly, I’m sure most play different games in their own free time outside of the public. Their income isn’t as big as say, those residing in America, so I can’t fault them to a degree.
I like that the video and audio of the game itself is not bad despite the 30fps lock, which some may take issue with but I see it as just a way to hide imperfections of the performance. The audio balancing is also quite good as you could’ve easily have problems of one being more noticeable than the other.
As for my critiques, and it may come across as harsh which I do not intend it to be, from the little I’ve seen I think you can edit out the audio whenever you are not speaking because I can otherwise hear the breathing from the microphone which the audience would not want to hear. If you are using a video editor software once you finish talking maybe a fade away or a straight cut can help to reduce the nagging problems. Although maybe that’s because you attach the audio to the capture itself. Perhaps there is a separate way to record just the microphone recording and the gameplay, but it might not be possible perhaps. And the commentary itself is very lacking: I do get that you would be focusing on the game as opposed to just talking to yourself for 30 minutes on a microphone, which is OK by me but I feel that you can add some more topics to spice up the video, otherwise it’d be just a glorified gameplay video. I’m not sure if this in response to those talkative annoying gaming commentary channels all those years back with the screaming and stuff, but you can be a more chill person and just talk about other things: maybe something that just came out of Netflix or the situation around you that would be interesting for a discussion. If you do struggle with long intervals of talking, or don’t like the segments, you can cut the audio AND the gameplay so that it can keep it at a good pace without stretching the video.
Anyway that’s all I have to say really. Best wishes.
That’s the thing though, I don’t use any video editing programs. I just record my gameplay footage with Windows 10’s Gamebar functionality. As for what you thought was my breathing, that is actually the sound of my electric fan. My setup is that there is an electric fan directly in front of me at all times as it is currently the dry season and I can’t make do without it. I can’t afford an AC (Airconditioning unit) as those eat up way too much electricity and electricity isn’t exactly cheap here either. Also my current internet option is an entry level pleb (poor man’s cheap) internet that only provides me with a constant 10Mbps download speed and a .80Mbps (800Kbps) upload speed, so I need to upload a 1Gb video file for three hours straight, and most of the videos on this playlist is bigger than 1Gb because I recorded them on 1080p resolution.
But I actually have another Let’s Play series I just got back working on…
It’s just seventeen episodes long at the moment but I just got back at it. I had to put this one on hiatus because I got annoyed at a local Facebook Group I am a part of and was actually the reason why I even started this Let’s Play project altogether. The group is a community of Mecha Animé toy collectors but the annoying Admin and group owner stopped me from posting my Let’s Play videos on his group. His stupidly annoying reason? The group is a place for toy collectors and NOT videogame enthusiasts. He didn’t even care for the fact that the characters in the game were the very same characters that stars in the very same Mecha Animê the group is named after
But I decided to go back to this project after I finished my XCOM Chimera Squad playthrough
There are some free video editors that are legit. I use Hitfilm Express myself but they might take up a lot of resources, but judging that you can run XCOM just fine I think it shouldn’t be a huge problem. I hear you can record mic audio seperately with Audacity from what I hear.
I tried using Openshot for a bit which seemed to work pretty well for basic stuff at least. I also found a tutorial for using Blender as a video editing software and while it’s a bit of a confusing mess to start with it seems to be a pretty decent option.
This was the reason I shied away from my dream of doing Let’s Plays early on, requiring a gameplay capture program and using video editing software. It was hard enough that building my current gaming rig was costly, not to mention internet and electricity costs that are way over the roof.
I’m happy with what Windows 10 has to offer with the Gamebar app. Sure the videos I made were amaturish, but I just think of it this way… My content are just like what was on offer back in 2008 when old school LPers like FireWizard23, Newfiebangaa, SSoHPKC, Zero9teen and HCBally started out the whole Let’s Plays scene.
