Status: Ongoing -- Next tutorial up will be Abandoned Mine
I have thought about being a teacher for quite some time. Oddly enough, that has a tendency to show when I play video games. I also seem to grasp concepts at least somewhat quicker than the average person, and I get a kick out of explaining what I've learned to other people! My friend Cam of Team Rushdown (Also available on Twitch!) decided we should work together on stuff, since I was [at the time] the most knowledgeable person he knew in terms of boss mode and he is the most knowledgeable person, and probably the best fighting gamer in general I have ever encountered. He started making scroll tutorials and I got lazy... But I helped when I could! Then... OGPlanet had a video contest, and I saw my chance!
Actually, I decided that I might as well release the one I was already working on at a time when a lot of people would watch it. I never actually expected to get anywhere with it in the contest, but I actually made it to the finals. Everyone else had made a music video, and then there was me, with a tutorial on the first stage. FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE:
Got my in-game guild to help on most of the subsequent videos, and even on this one too! And when possible, I call on Cam's help, because even though he knows absolutely EVERYTHING about the scrolls he's using, he's also just really good in general in boss mode too! Really, he's just an all-around amazing gamer.
What's interesting about this series is that I got to learn the ins and outs of Ulead through this series. You can tell as I go along in the series that I'm learning more and more things. I tried to keep it on schedule, of one tutorial a month, but... It just wasn't possible at the time. I still am not sure if I could steadily pump out one of these a month, with the time that goes into them, and the footage editing and all that jazz. I also haven't played Rumble Fighter in... something like six months, so that also poses kind of a hindrance to what I'm doing. Fear not though, I will in fact finish this series.
The plan for the tutorials is to go through all of them on Normal, just like I have been doing so far. After that I'll be moving on to Hard Difficulty, and only basically filling you in on what's changed. I mean, after I've gone through everything in the normal tutorials, it won't be hard to add on to what I've done.
Also, at some point (Probably when I'm done with everything on normal), I would like to try something with annotations that I've seen before and really thought was great. I'll probably take a short video of the stage select screen, and then add annotations to each of the images of the stages so you can choose what stage you want to learn about by clicking on the corresponding link to a video. Maybe when I move onto the Hard and Hell difficulties I'll split the annotation windows up into difficulties as well. I think the idea of having interactive videos is really great. Annotations can really change your content around, and draw people in. They're also quite polarizing, unfortunately. A lot of people don't like to see too many additions to a video when they believe they're not absolutely necessary, and thus many people just automatically turn off their annotations.
What's neat about annotations, is that you can use them to add things to a video to revise things that have changed, or if you make a mistake, like with spelling for example, you can always cover it up with an annotation. In that regard, they're kind of like band-aids for your videos. If any of you have ever edited a video, you'll know it's incredibly time-consuming... On top of that, if you make a mistake, for the most part you can't just edit it out, you have to get new footage, which can also be quite a hassle, especially for people like me. My setup requires actual setting up before it's ready to be used.
As it stands right now, I've got the first six stages on normal covered. Al Hata (N) is right above here on the blog! Then there's Dark Monastery (N) and Sanctum -AKA Sanctuary- (N).
I got to use the annotations feature for something kind of neat, at least IMHO with Sanctum. When I finished the video originally, it was actually too large for me to upload to YouTube, so I had to split it into two parts. I tried to separate it naturally into the Left and Right paths and then the boss, so I used a pause annotation and then link annotations. The plan I have for the select screen will kind of function in the same manner, but I'll be using Spotlight Annotation (Like when I link to a player's Channel by highlighting their name/healthbar) instead, so you can just click where you normally would if you wanted to go to that stage! This was a test of the pause annotation, and I think it's actually worked out pretty well for me.
Next up were Locke's Refuge (N) and Dragon's Lair (N). Then I got to Vladimir's Castle... This posed a huge problem for me, since if you've ever played Vlad's Castle, you'd know that it's actually three normal boss stages in one. It takes a LONG time to complete, and the three stages are almost totally different from one another. I broke it down into three parts. The Minion Breakdown and the Boss Breakdown actually pale in comparison both in views and in length to the longest video of the three, which might actually be my longest normal video on all of YouTube-- besides my first YouTube Stream. The longest video, and most watched of the three is the stage breakdown.
I got to explain all the traps and obstacles in this one, and that's why it took so long... I also learned a lot of things about the levels in the process. Stuff that I had randomly glossed over while playing, but realized when I took a closer look. It seems that when making a tutorial, you get to learn things too! Or, at least, you'll be able to notice things that you knew, but didn't realize you knew. That's also something that you should be doing as a teacher too. Maybe... It's better to say that's one of the perks?
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