It’s announcement time!
I’ve been teasing changes to the channel for a little while now, and, well, those changes are here. They are upon us.
There’s a lot to get through so rather than labour each point off the bat, I’ll give you a bullet-point list of what’s happening. Then, if you’re still interested, you can keep watching for more details.
- Channel Rebrand
- The Card Game
- Regular Twitch Streams
- b3agz Jam 2023
- Merch
- Minecraft and 7 Days to Die Series
Channel Rebrand
So, let’s start with the most obvious one. Hopefully, if you’re watching this, you’ve noticed a bit of a new look around here. This is all part of my effort to give my channel a recognisable brand because…
See, here’s the thing. I never set out to be a proper YouTuber, and even when my subscriber count started climbing into the thousands, it never really felt like more than a quirky little hobby. But the channel recently passed 10 thousand subs, and it gave me a bit of a new perspective.
Now, anyone who’s had much to do with YouTube will be able to tell you that having 10 thousand subs is a LONG way from quitting the day job and becoming a full-time YouTuber, but it IS enough for me to start looking at it a bit more seriously.
You know, giving it the old side eye *kissy faces*
So that’s what we’re doing; giving YouTube the old side-eye, and trying to be a bit more professional about the whole thing.
That means proper branding that I use across all different platforms. That means trying to upload new videos more consistently. And that means getting involved in the game dev community more.
The Card Game
If you’ve been watching the channel for a while, you might remember the game I started making with the intent to release. Like, properly. On Steam and stuff.
That project is still alive, but it’s had a few setbacks. Like a noob, I managed to lose about two weeks of progress at one point because I wasn’t backing up.
Always back up.
Then I raged-coded my way through the progress I’d lost, and in the process created some godawful spaghetti mess that I then put off refactoring for like 2 months.
Long story short, I’ve started over.
This time I have a solid idea of how everything’s going together and there’ll be proper planning and project management and whatnot.
Now, if this game and its development interests you, you might be interested in the next point…
Regular Twitch Streams
I am starting… have started, actually… streaming on Twitch. The main content of my Twitch channel will be the development of the card game, though I’m open to doing other stuff on stream.
- Hot tub streams.
- Sleeping streams.
- Just Dance.
- All of those are jokes don’t @ me.
But we could develop other things, play games, any of that. I’m doing this on Twitch because I’m very conscious of the fact that, if I start putting a lot of effort into making game dev and content creation into an actual career but all my eggs are on YouTube… well it would be pretty bad if YouTube banned me or died or my account got stolen.
b3agz Jam 2023
We are doing the jam thing again!
I’m looking to make this officially an annual thing, so instead of calling it b3agz Jam 3, we’re calling it b3agz Jam 2023. Now, compared to the first jam, our second jam was a bit of a damp squib, and that’s mostly on me for kind of throwing it out there with not long to go and not really promoting it.
So, with that in mind, b3agz Jam 2023 will be taking place towards the end of January giving you two months from the date of this video to prepare. There will also be 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes this time, and I will be making more of an effort to promote it. For more details, head over to the itch.io page!
So, I hope as many of you as possible can take part and, if you can, spread the word. Let’s see if we can make b3agz Jam 1 look like a mini jam!
Merch
The notion of b3agz merch started out because I wanted a personally designed desk mat and kind of grew from there. As of right now, my store only has a t-shirt, a desk mat, and some stickers… because those are things I personally wanted. I’m open to adding more stuff if it’s something people are interested in.
If you want to check that out, head over to shop.b3agz.com.
Minecraft and 7 Days to Die Series
So, onto the thing I get asked about the most.
I am officially killing the Minecraft and 7 Days series’, and I’ll explain why. When I first started these series’, I didn’t plan anything out. I quickly reached a point where I needed to go off and figure out how to do the thing we were doing next before I could make the video.
The problem with this is those projects are big. Really big. Anyone who watched the Minecraft threading videos will know how hard a time I had trying to make things work without rebuilding the entire project from the ground up, and that’s just not practical, both in terms of my time and in terms of the convoluted code I’d have to create to make things work with the existing project.
I know this sucks for those of you waiting for more Minecraft or 7 Days videos, but what I will say is I am only killing the series—I’m not saying I will never make another video on the subject.
If there’s something people want to see that can be done as a stand-alone video and it doesn’t need to be built within the Minecraft or 7 Days projects, I’m open to it.
But as a series, they are officially dead.
Sorry.
So, That’s It!
That’s the big update. As you can see if you’re reading this, the website has also been updated. I plan to be more active here, hopefully creating text companions to videos where possible, but also just writing about things I want to write about. Normally I’d have done that over at Medium, but I’ve come to realise that it’s not the best place to put personal content, and it doesn’t pay particularly well. If I’m gonna write for myself, I may as well do it here.
I hope you all stick around, and I’ll see you in a video or stream soon.
