Around March last year, after mastering Pink Panther: Pinkadelic Pursuit on RetroAchievements, I had an idea; why not make a guide on how to beat every record time in the game? Up until then my videos were all mostly highlight videos (something like Fitz, SwaggerSouls etc. Basically friends fucking around in video games) and I always wanted to try scripted content, but I had no niche I was interested in to do that. So I thought, why not? And from that point I truly started loving making content. Sure, it takes longer to make these kinds of videos, but I never in any video making process (recording, scripting, voice over, editing) have felt tired of doing it, or burnt out. I truly think I found my passion and niche when it comes to YouTube.
But the thing is, as much as I love doing this, at the start I decided to be a strictly "RetroAchievements" YouTuber.
The reason for that was because at the time I lost motivation to play games and I just generally disliked them, and
the concept of RetroAchievements made me enjoy gaming again. So, just to play it safe I decided to only do RA stuff.
And trust me I still love doing RA videos and it will never stop, I still want to dedicate my channel to RetroAchievements.
I have hundreds of video ideas and it ain't stopping. Fuck, I even have challenges within sets that aren't even mandatory
(you'll see when I eventually do a video on them :3), but the thing is I was kinda too scared to branch out. Once you're
labelled as a YouTuber of some sort of niche, it's kinda hard to make content on other stuff... is what I innitially thought.
I experimented with my first non RA video; The Worst Looney Tunes Game You've Never Played.
And to say that video performed well is an understatement. At the time my most viewed video was at ~350 views, and this one
absolutely smashed it. It was my first video to hit not only 1k views but 10k, and is now sitting at 18k views. With this video
I kinda realized that people wanna watch me because of not only the content itself but because of... well, me, too. People
enjoyed my personality, my humour, the way I present the topic, and the amount of research I do because I am insanely
autistic, etc. So after going with a more laid back style for the upcoming video (well, the video after that), it absolutely
fucking exploded, with it now having 36k views. It literally gave me the ability to monetize videos. After that I knew I was
certain I safely make non RA videos.
Like I said, they're still my primary focus. Literally the next two upcoming videos are RetroAchievements lol, but I still want to experiment. Of course I am not stupid enough, I know that I'm a "challenge" content creator and that if I go and create videos on idfk Stardew Valley let's plays, I'll get basically 0 views, I have to stick within my genre. The thing is though, I have some ideas but I am not too sure on what to do. I hate self imposed challenges and I'd rather die than be forced to make a "CaN yOu BeAt GaMe WiThOuT pIsSinG, sHiTtInG oR fArTinG???". The first thing that immediately comes to mind are achievements in regular games. Like, on Steam or Xbox. And that can actually work! If most of the games didn't have absolutely fucking awful achievements. I like RetroAchievements because not only am I playing retro games in a completely new way, but the achievements actually give me some sort of challenge. It isn't just "walk forward and win" (and people complaining about hard achievements that are feasibly attainable if you spend some time on it can absolutely fuck off, skill issue.) And most of the achievements on Steam are literally the opposite of what I like. Well, for most games, the exceptions are mostly indie games. I could do Super Meat Boy, Pizza Tower, Binding of Isaac (NOT REBIRTH), Jump King, Celeste, etc, and as much as I like those ideas, they just take way too much time to 100%. Not saying that's an issue, but with me juggling school (and especially right now where I am at my FINAL YEAR of high school) and also wanting to do content consistently, it's just not happening. I don't have multiple hours per day to spare to gaming. I actually wanted to do Super Meat Boy as a video after the Sheep Raider video, but I was like a month and almost 60 hours in and I was 80% of the way, and the last set of achievements (Dark World hitless) required a LOT of grinding. Cotton World Dark World hitless usually takes people 5 MONTHS TO GET. So yeah, I decided to scrap the video altogether and delete 60 hours worth of footage. Doing these grindy achievement sets (RetroAchievements included) will be feasible if I ever go full time with content creation, which I am doing everything in my power to achieve after I graduate university. For now, sets that are hard, but are feasible to master in around a month at most are okay. A month sounds like a lot but that's how long it took me to master every Tom and Jerry game for this video.
More ideas like my worst Looney Tunes game could for sure work! I just don't want to overdo it. It sounds silly, considering my videos are like "omg dis achievement is hardz!" but I, like many people, don't like the "x you haven't y of", it's just way too overused. I still want to make videos talking about unknown/forgotten games, though. I currently have two ideas (which I am not telling in detail lol), one with a Disney game, while the other is a platformer I LOVED as a kid. Hopefully when my channel grows enough I'll be able to shed more light on them. Another thing with these types of videos is I don't wanna be forced to make it; just because a game is unpopular doesn't mean that I wanna make a video on it, it needs to be something where my interest in the game overweights every other emotion I have on it.
Lastly, this is the section where I can't really put the ideas in a category that's other than "challenge that's in the game". Let's take for example Garfield Kart. In the time trials mode you have times you have to beat; Bronze, Silver, Gold and lastly - Platinum. The platinum times are really hard for an average Garfield Karter to beat, and me having experience with the game and its controls, is perfect for a video. "I beat EVERY Developer Time in Garfield Kart" is already in my Google Doc of list of video ideas. I know they're not exactly "Developer Times" but hey, it's not my problem that the current YouTube meta is overexaggarated and clickbaity titles. I would like to talk about these more but I honestly don't want to give out my ideas away, I want to do them in secret and hype them to my audience. But I since I want to start streaming after I graduate highschool, I can spoil another video idea I want to do on stream and that is Garfield Lasagna Party Hard AI Minigame speedruns. (Damn what a mouthful). My goal for this is to get good enough at the category where I can get a really good time, then make a video explaining each minigame and how it works in hard mode, and of course explain the speedrun strategies, etc. I know that this is technically a self imposed challenge, but this is speedrun content that I already have done on my channel and is a game that I want to talk about, and again, is unknown enough to where I wanna shed some light on it, as I love getting good at games like these.
In the end though, I shouldn't worry too much about this, as when it comes to choosing what videos to work on, I legit just choose the idea I wanna work on at the moment (if it isn't a video for a milestone of some sort), but I do want to try to make at least one or two non RA videos a year. It all depends on how motivated I am to do that tho, but since my Garfield Kart addiction is back, I'll probably do the Developer Time video after finishing the Super Mario 64 and the Tom and Jerry marathon sequel video.