A while back I mentioned my then-upcoming presentation at the Nationalist Media Conference. Thanks to Meister Lect for having me, and an even bigger thanks for all the additional time he spent editing my presentation to appear far smoother and coherent than in its original form. Lect even scoured through my Odysee page to find relevant gameplay clips that were never in the original Powerpoint(esque) show.
I quite proud of my work, but no amount of improvements from Lect could have turned this into a Hollywood production. For example, I don’t have a good audio setup, so my original plan was to use an AI voice version of myself to read out the script. In the last few days putting it all together, I found out that I didn’t have enough tokens with ElevenLabs, the AI audio software. The fallback option was my $10 Dynex USB microphone, and I think it shows.
Even ignoring the low production values, there are some issues. Lect did a great job cutting out the dead air, or the times when I started a sentence or two over again, but there were a few points that I didn’t state entirely clearly, or small details that I skipped over, and no amount of editing can fix that. I also think that there’s a lot to be said for text content over video content if you’re actually trying to learn. Yes, sometimes a picture can be worth a thousand words, and some things are entirely inexplicable without an accompanying short video. However, I can and do add those to my articles, and I find written work to be far more convenient and practical for future reference in comparison to scouring through an hour long video, looking for miscellaneous details.
Relevant to all this is a recent comment I received from “Octopus Complex,” under my last article raging about the alt-firing complications.
Could you just add the removed alt-fire “abilities” in as new weapons in themselves? Sorry if this has been covered in a previous post but hopefully with this you could retain some of the work you put in.
I repeat my response below.
Not a terrible idea. Unfortunately, that adds an additional complication. Right now, provided you know what weapon you’re holding, you can always switch to the other one by pressing tab. If there are three weapons, this requires a more complicated control scheme. With four or more weapons, something entirely different.
I actually had four weapons in the game at some point, and you had to use the Crysis style suit control scheme to switch between them. It’s slow, and I don’t think that I need all that much variety anyway.
I should also note that this weapon switching was accomplished with the use of the middle mouse button, which would necessitate the grenades being put on another button, presumably one which takes the left hand fingers away from the WASD controls.
I bring all this up, because one of the additions that Lect made in the editing process unearthed this old game footage of exactly the mechanic I was talking about. This was removed from the game so long ago that I doubt I could have easily tracked down any relevant videos.
It was a great comment though, and segues into something I mentioned in my talk, and will write about here, which is that game development is a series of seemingly-intelligent decisions that need to be rigorously tested and in many cases, discarded.
