“The secret to doing anything is believing that you can do it. Anything that you believe you can do strong enough, you can do. Anything. As long as you believe.”
Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting
Mistakes and Accidents
I’ll be honest. I’m not perfect.
“Well… duh.”
Quiet, you.
I jest, but, seriously, I’m not perfect, and I shouldn’t strive to be perfect. To be perfect is to be without room for improvement. To be perfect at 21 is to be a product of God himself. Both of these are not ideal. I love learning, but I’m still way too harsh on myself when mistakes are made and accidents occur.
The Metroid Fiasco
Let’s take Let’s Play Metroid: Samus Returns, for example.
Despite being the first major project I’ve worked on in the history of my channel, I was still increadibly hard on myself when working on the last two episodes. What was wrong? Apparently, during the run of the series, some episodes had incorrect item trackers. That is, to say, that either I had the incorrect maximum amount of items that could be found in an area or the item tracker didn’t update correctly during an episode or, in some cases, both occured.
This absolutely devastated me, as I was striving to do the very best possible, but it just didn’t happen.
However, I did realize that part of my problems were, in part, caused by me using an under-powered laptop for what I was aiming to do. My computer would regularly slow down to an insane degree once I started really working on the item tracker portion of the video.
I have promised myself that I’ll completely re-edit this series after I get myself a better computer. Once I have this new computer, editing those video will be a breeze, especially since I won’t have to re-edit the last two episodes.
Below is an example of what I had to do for Metroid: Samus Returns.
The image above is the final timeline for Episode 16 of that series. The process of editing that video involved a lot of going back-and-forth between my notes, previous episodes, and a handful of wikis. All in all, it took roughly 8 hours to edit this one video, and the video came out to be roughly an hour and a half.
This series definitely taught me a thing or two about patience, and even how to set up some presets to make certain edits a lot easier.
PokeErrors
If there’s two main lessons I learned from working on my Let’s Play of Pokemon: Blue Version, they are that 1.) I should always, always, always use more than one source when doing research and 2.) I need to give myself more than just four weeks to prepare for a series as demanding as this.
Let’s start with that first point: using more than one source. I did, in fact, use more than one source when doing pre-production research for Metroid: Samus Returns, but I got cocky and used only Bulbapedia for all of my information regarding the Gen 1 Pokemon games. In reality, I should have cross-checked it with other sites like Serebii.net.
This became evident when I started having issues with keeping all the information regarding the Red & Blue rival fights correct for some of the later fights. While I was able to go in and make new sidebars to cover for these mistakes, it was not ideal. Additionally, there was infromation that I had gotten wrong regarding certain Pokemon and even wild encounters for certain routes.
This, somehow, gets me to the second thing I learned: I should have given myself more than just three or four weeks to prep for this series.
Segues are hard.
Admittadly, three to four weeks is not enough time to do all of the necessary research, cross-check, graphic development, and note finalizing needed for something as complex as Pokemon. Even in the first generation, there’s a decent amount of complexity to type-matchups, encounter rates, and even the composition of your rival’s team, which changes a good deal depending on what his starter is.
As you can see in the image above, things can get very complicated very quickly. Even if two teams have overlapping Pokemon, they aren’t the same level.
All of this has accumulated to the realization that if I ever do another Pokemon game, I need at least a few months to a year to really have everything in order, especially if I want to do Pokemon: Crystal. Gen 2 has so much to it, that it will probably take me a good six months to a year to prep.
The Sign-Off
That’s going to be it for this blog post. I felt like I should really talk about this instead of just saying that these series didn’t meet my expectations in the previous post.
I hope you all are enjoying these blog posts! I’ll try to keep these to a maximum of two posts per month. Additionally, if you want to know how you can support myself and my content, you can check out the Support the Content page.
Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you all next Monday for Mini-Pack!
