Tainted Mantis

I'm on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/c/TaintedMantis and Twitter http://www.twitter.com/taintedmantis

[taintedmantis]

2023 Wrap Up! What I Achieved (and What I Didn't) Plus 2024 Goals

We're at that time of the year again! What a blast this year has been for me as a Gaming Content Creator to look back on. For this, I'll be referring to these Tumblr blog entries:

1. 2023: Reevaluating My Content and Developer Goals For This Year

2. End of 2023 Content Creator and Developer Goals (Updated as at August)

Let's start with what I didn't manage to achieve this year.

Indie Game Dev:

Achievements

The hobby dev team I'm in managed to recruit a graphic artist, and we were able to create something out of a game jam back in April. As mentioned in the August blog entry, the game still needs polishing and honoring the team's agreement to not showcase it yet until it's ready, it was still a fun dating sim project that involves mycelium! However, we're at the point where we aren't quite able to do this on a more regular basis due to new job schedules for a few of our team members. So...looks like my time as a game developer is currently on hold for a while.

Having gotten that out of the way, let's continue with what I did manage to achieve and where I'm headed in 2024.

YouTube:

Achievements

As at now (December 31, 2023), I'm sitting at 690 subscribers, just 10 subs shy of hitting 700 at time of writing. It doesn't sound like a big number, but at this time last year, I was only over 300 subscribers, with me hitting close to 400 on January 18 this year.

Specific tweet here.

This means almost doubling the number of subscribers on my channel, which I am grateful for, and already a fabulous achievement for a small creator like me. ❤️

Targets for 2024

Will the upcoming year be the year I'll finally hit 1000 subs? I'm absolutely positive it will be! With the trend of my best videos being the Get Better At Mahjong series that constantly receive views daily, I can see it coming. Despite only producing possibly 1 mahjong video annually at this point, it's the tabletop game that will always be in demand no matter what, especially during the Lunar New Year period when the entire community that celebrates the festival plays this game to entertain the rest of the family. The better question is exactly when this will happen! Let's see if this will happen by the Year of the Dragon!🐉

Content Creation:

Achievements

1. Festivals and Why You Should Play series: Having covered several Steam festivals, ranging from Next Fest to LudoNarraCon, I have come across many games that would have otherwise flown under my radar. With so many amazing games released in 2023 in particular, I had to start a new series that goes a little more in-depth on individual games. This is when I decided to start the Why You Should Play series. The playlist is still a little too short to have it appear on the landing page, but I hope I'm able to give the games a little more justice and attention to some of the details that I wasn't able to cover in the more generic festival videos that usually only offer demo coverage. There are still many games that I have planned videos for, but with my ability as a one-man-band doing everything while also honoring other commitments, many of these have to be on hold. Hopefully less so in 2024, but let's see!🤣

2. Let's Plays: Noticeably, I have done a lot less Let's Play style videos in the past year. This is not to say I don't want to keep doing them, but due to lack of views and my inability to be amusing enough to be entertaining, I've decreased the frequency of this video style in favor of more structured videos. It also means putting more effort into increasing the production value for the other videos, which means my video releases are less frequent compared to 2021 days. However, seeing the improved quality of videos I've released in 2023 is a great reason to continue that trend. I will see if I can finish off some of the Let's Play titles that are in progress at a later time, but with upcoming new schedules, I cannot make any promises on that. I will try to squeeze something interesting in once in a while where possible (such as the Two Point Campus Christmas Challenge video).

3. Convention series: As Covid-19 started to ease off in January and Hong Kong finally opening up to the world after nearly 3 years of being in constant lockdown, I began to consider heading back out there and put gaming travel as part of my channel branding as it was my original plan pre-Covid to start travel vlogging. It was one of the best decisions I've made this year with meeting many gaming industry peers at conventions, plus putting faces to Twitter mutuals. This is where I decided to begin some form of gaming related travel series, though I admit I am a little slow in the turnover as the time commitment to editing has been quite challenging on my end. I only have 2 videos related to conventions so far, but more videos are coming!

Targets for 2024

With dates set and churning out travel plans in advance, my convention attendance and coverage will overall increase as with continuing coverage for Steam festivals (Next Fest in particular). The only thing I'm afraid of right now is creator burn out, but by far I'm managing this reasonably well, despite may sometimes requiring me to take a week or two off from video editing on occasions due to sudden mandatory commitments. As long as this trend continues, we're good to go!

Last Words for 2023

Best year yet! Thank you everybody who has been supportive of my journey and am absolutely grateful for the opportunities presented to meet new (and finally non-virtual) faces from the gaming industry. I'll leave a photo of my cosplay of FFVII's Tifa (that I wore to gamescom asia 2023) as a reminder of this year's achievements as I continue my Gaming Content Creator journey through to 2024. Here's to a fabulous 2024!🎉

[taintedmantis]

End of 2023 Content Creator and Developer Goals (Updated as at August)

Yup, it's certainly been a while since I last made a blog entry! A lot has happened since my last entry made during the Chinese New Year period.

In terms of developer goals, many of them have been influenced by real life events from my team members in the dev team (members moving across the globe). We simply had to go through some changes organically to fit everything around each other's schedules (across several continents and 3 different time zones). Despite the hassle, we did do a game jam together during this time and actually made a dating sim! For now, that is the only information I'm allowed to reveal as we want to first polish the game a little more before we let other interested players play the game when we do finally upload it on Itch. For now though, half of the team is busy with other commitments, so do forgive us for not updating more than this. 😅

However, in other news as a Content Creator: I am starting a series where I will actually cover game shows! There are actually 2 more conventions I'm already planning to go to later this year, while hopefully for one of them I can participate more than just an attendee, but that will of course depend on my work as a Content Creator for my channel and overall as a brand. For now, I don't quite know what other details I'll be able to cover at my current standard as a solo creator, aside from doing quick travel vlog style action videos like I did for the Ani-Com & Games 2023 event I did a few weeks back, but let's hope I'll be able to find some awesome things to cover during this time!

In case you've missed it, here's a sample of the kind of content I'll definitely be able to cover when I'm at a game show (hello again at Ani-Com)!

[taintedmantis]

2023: Reevaluating My Content and Developer Goals For This Year

It might be nearly the end of January now, but today is the 1st official working day after Chinese New Year, so Happy New Year everybody (enjoy the lohei gif I found)!

After reevaluating a lot of things over the past month (since mid-December), I’ve been planning on what I will be doing for my YouTube channel as a content creator and my path as an indie game developer on the side.

YouTube: Don’t worry, I’m still making content! Monster Hunter, mahjong, indie games, and Steam Festivals will continue to appear on my channel, but, as an addition to what I’m already doing, this year I’ll start attending game conventions (budget and time allowing) as part of sharing what everybody who’s following me loves the most: video games. Currently I’m looking at covering East and South East Asia as those locations are the most accessible to travel from Hong Kong now that the world is finally opening up from post-Covid and scrapping quarantine requirements. For that, I’m absolutely excited about attending and potentially meeting other creators/developers over our love for different video games, and it’ll also be great for those who live on the far side of the globe to experience a slice of the gaming conventions we have here in Asia. Here’s to hoping that HK wouldn’t go back to the dark times of the 1st half of 2022! 

Indie Dev: As some of you may already know, I’m also a part of a game development group that made our first game jam together in 2021′s Cultural Heritage Game Jam. After some hiccups and setbacks last year, we’ve come together again and redefined how we should be approaching our development process. You can read more about it in our devlog and also the team members’ resolutions. I will be updating this area after our initial timeline (this June) to let you know about how we’re faring after 6 months into the trial stage of developing games as a workshop.

Anyway, I’m excited already and let 2023 be the best year yet! ❤🔥

[taintedmantis]

[taintedmantis]

Why Some Of The Best Ideas Come From Game Jams

This is more thoughts on why every game developer needs to do game jams, continuing from my earlier entry here.

One game that I have recently played and thought was a brilliant idea is Out of Hands. Still currently in the demo version, Out of Hands is a turn based strategy card game (without the tedious deck building style that games such as Magic: The Gathering has as the core mechanic) where the player needs to defeat their inner psychological demons.

On the surface it sounds simple that anybody can think of, but in fact, this actually came from a game jam, especially the visual aspect of the game. The game developer Zeyu Yang came up with using his hands in place of art as visuals due to his lack of experience in graphic design. It’s incredible how solutions can come when there are several limitations (such as time and skill restrictions).

For further reading, check out Yang’s interview with Screen Rant about the game here.

I’ve also made a quick introduction and some of my reactions plus gameplay in my latest video.

[taintedmantis]

Why I’m Playing The Secret of Monkey Island On My Channel

The Secret of Monkey Island (SE) is a special game, despite not being my first time to play the Monkey Island series. With so much critical acclaim, and being the first game that revolutionized the point and click adventure genre with creative pixel art, it’s the one game that needs to be introduced to the new generation who didn’t grow up in the same era. From the documentary by onaretrotip, who made the documentary on The Making of Monkey Island, the developers of the original Monkey Island game took the effort in to making use of the limited technology at the time to make the game as great as it could be.

The things that turned this series into a cult classic are the details and care put into the games...from reading playground insults to fight your way to the top (back when there was no voice acting in the original game) and the well placed jokes to moderate difficulty but thoughtful puzzles and the inability to die in-game. Today I often see point and click games, and the reason why developers make them is that they loved the Monkey Island series growing up.

Hence why I’m playing the series on my YouTube channel. It’s a classic. And all gamers should play it at least once in their lives.

In a way, it’s like sharing your love for the original Star Wars series and introducing them to friends who have yet to come across the gem of a series.

Thank you, George Lucas, for believing in the LucasArts team!

[taintedmantis]

We did it! I'm at 100 subs! Looking forward to making more content for you all!

[taintedmantis]

Update: Happy 2022!

For sure I have been neglecting my Tumblr as it’s more difficult to update this section with sharing YouTube videos each and every time I upload (sometimes editing and uploading through to ungodly hours). Having said that, Happy 2022!

It is unlikely that I’ll update Tumblr every time I have a video posted, so instead, I’ll be using Tumblr as a side blog to supplement anything I’d like to share.

(So, go over to my Twitter or YouTube and follow/subscribe to keep updated there!)

This year, aside from continuing with uploading content on YouTube, I have also started a new gaming related project, thanks to the Game Jam I participated in back in November 2021 with some friends. After 2 weeks, we’ve gotten ourselves a prototype of a visual novel game! While I will not be delving into more details at this point, I am in the process of creating a full on visual novel game based off of the game jam we created.

If you’re interested in playing, the game jam version of the game is available on Itch.io through this link: https://teamtonicmoon.itch.io/

It is something I am incredibly proud of, even though I do not have coding skills nor do I (currently) know how to use the likes of Unity and Unreal, being part of a project that ends up being an actual game is like a breath of fresh air.

If you’re a gamer, and you’re still looking for a target for 2022, I highly recommend participating in a Game Jam. In the video I’m sharing below, I’ve given my thoughts and pointers to help you get started. You never know what you might create.

[taintedmantis]

New vid: Monster Hunter Stories 2 Demo Part 3

We come across a shady character! Complete with a shady quest to match! It got me laughing in stitches when I saw who the shady character was!

[taintedmantis]

New vid: Monster Hunter Stories 2 Demo Part 2

We continue with the demo and explore the map plus take a more in-depth look at the gameplay. 

[taintedmantis]

New vid: Monster Hunter Stories 2 Demo Part 1

The demo is out now! We take a first look at the gameplay of the latest Monster Hunter game.

[taintedmantis]

New vid: Getting S+ for Rampage Apex Zinogre!

I landed in a random rampage quest and completed the required objectives to reach S+ rank. It’s possible. :)

[taintedmantis]

New vid: Cosplaying as Harley Quinn and going on a Gargwa Egg Race with friends! I had a lot of fun doing this week’s challenge at SnowFall Discord (hunt in a cosplay character), from updating my look all the way to some spontaneous photo taking and hunts with some friends. As a result, it indeed ended up becoming a Gargwa carrying egg race.

[taintedmantis]

New video is up! We talk about camera functions and some photo taking shortcuts and hot tips when taking selfies or photos of monsters.

[taintedmantis]

New video up! I’ve managed to play some Monster Hunter Rise demo version 2 with some friends! Magnamalo is a real beast I tell you! 

[taintedmantis]

New video up! I’ve made a guide on how to use the God’s Isle set to play the controller role for the Brachydios charm farm. It can be a little intimidating at first glance, because unlike using the typical Zinogre HBG to just DPS and shoot away (at the head), the role of the controller is different. But with the right setup, skills, and procedure, plus a little bit of practice, you’ll be able to host your own charm farming hubs.

[taintedmantis]

New Video up! I’m playing Chinese Parents! It’s an incredible sim we’ll find out whether some of the Tiger Mom concept stereotypes are true! What a great start to the Year of the Ox!