The trip started off wonderfully, with a 90+ minute delay before I even left. Got into SFO around 12:45 and waited for about 20 minutes until John and Joey’s plane landed. Got bag and left to get a BART into the city. Now, John grew up in this general area, so we trusted him with the simple task of airport navigation to the BART station… and instead we wound up doing a giant loop through a parking garage that put us right back where we started. At that point, I took charge, and we quickly made it to the train and eventually to out swanky hotel.

I guess I should note that I stayed in a suite with Dan, John, and Joey from Armor Games. Dan flew in on Friday to see some friends, so we were expecting him to be at the hotel and get us access to our room. But apparently he was 20+ minutes away, driving an ‘82 pick up truck for some reason. We wait and eventually Dan arrives. Our room appears to be too small for 4 people, so Dan decides to get us a swankier suite with plenty of extra space. And a freakish lack of outlets.

Not too much interesting stuff took place in the room… we were pretty tired from the trip in, and took an hour or two to relax before the party that night. Then I get a phonecall from a developer I know, benologist… except I don’t remember giving him my number. He wants to bring another guy I know, who makes music, to the party. Dan, being the nice guy he is, allows this. Except beno called me from a hotel, didn’t tell me his room number, and I couldn’t remember his last name to get connected to him room from the hotel staff.

We head to the party, which is next door to where last year’s Armor Party was. I volunteered to go with Dan in the ghetto cruiser. Thankfully, I did not die. The party was solid. About 30 people, many of which I knew already… few I didn’t. Had a few beers, some food, good conversation. All in all some good fun. With dinner over, it was off to a nearby bowling alley for some heated competition with big prizes.

Me, being the giant douche that I am, brought one of my bowling balls with me from LA… along with my shoes. This did not wind up helping me, as I bowled like complete crap. But, developers tend to not be the most atheltic people… so I still handily won. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, which was the most important thing anyway. The top 5 scorers were put into a drawing for 5 prizes… basically as a method of preventing me from getting the top prize automatically. I really wanted that NetBook too. Instead, that musician that beno brought along wound up getting it… grrr. On the other hand, I now own a DSi… but apparently it does not come with games? Not sure what to do about this, but I’ll figure it out.

After we finished bowling, we still hung around and talked for a bit at the lanes. Then walked back to our hotel with a drunk Weasel (not the Thing-Thing one, the Frantastic Contraption / Streambirds one). We were going to have a nightcap with him at the hotel bar… sadly it was already closed. He left, and we went up to bed.

Not too bad of a first day, in spite of the 5am wake up. Will have storytime on Day 2 later, along with commentary on FGS.

My channel has been top100 views for Gurus and Gaming for a while now, but I’ve never had an individual video in the top100 for Gaming. Until now. Without even noticing it, TITOL1 is #73 all time in Gaming. Which makes it 1 of 4 flash games in the top100 (Red Remover walkthrough, Pandemic 2 instructions, Wake Up The Box walkthrough). Here’s to hoping on getting many more vids in there.

On my top portals/devs list, I only included my own videos. I was debating including games I did not do the videos for in this list (Red Remover, Cover Orange, etc)… but decided that I couldn’t make it all-inclusive, and therefore I should not include it. So here is the list of games that I’ve done videos for that have over 1 million total video views:

That’s the full list. 7 games. Hopefully there will be some new additions soon.

I don’t really have anything to say… nothing that exciting has happened this past week. TITOLT is doing great across the web, which is awesome.

Make sure to check out the forums, they’re quickly becoming a happening place.

I spent some time on 2/17/10 compiling a spreadsheet of my top 100 videos, their aprox viewcount (rounded down to closest 1000), sponsor, developer, and whether the video was featured in-game or not. From there, I tabulated the top sponsors and the top developers (only calculated devs with 3+ videos in top 100, unless they have 800k+ views).

I have 450+ total videos, so this is less than 25% of my total videos… but these 100 account for over 22 million of my 27+ million views, so they are a fairly accurate representation of the whole. Obviously, the farther down the list you look, the less accurate it is (like LegitGames having 1 video on there, but they have 2 others that just missed the cut).

Any questions or additional data you guys would like to see? I did not include the raw list of top 100, nor did I do any analysis of in-game vs not in-game. And TITOL2 is not counted in this list for Armor or jmtb.

So after all this type and posts and whatnot… the game is now out. Play it. Post comments telling me your thoughts on it.

Play TITOL2 here on Tasselfoot.com. Play TITOL2 on Armor Games.

If you need assistance (you probably will… the game is harder than the first!), try this.

Ever wondered what it would be like to work side-by-side with one of your favorite developers and create a game? Well, with This Is The Only Levels 2 slated for release tomorrow, these are my thoughts from the process:

Developing games, when you don’t have to do any of the grunt work, is REALLY fun. I got to come up with a ton of really fun levels and assist with the entire creative process throughout development… without having to do any of that pesky “work”, like coding or making graphics.

A lot more goes into a game than just code and art. Besides all the creative stuff, which we pretty much hammered out on the 1st day, all of this stuff needed to be done as well: UI for the menu and other off-menu screens, game save system, high scores, bonus modes, and API implementation.

It’s amazing how many bugs pop up in the oddest areas. This is something I already know, from all the testing work I do… but that is all AFTER the dev QAs his game. In a game as simple as TITOL2 (same engine as last game, just new levels), we easily found 20 bugs. From a certain level having an unexpected exploit to the save file not wiping deaths when you clear your level progress, and everything in between.

You can’t get too attached to any one idea. Given unlimited time, John could code any crazy level that I came up with… but one level we wanted to use left gravity for the level, so you’d have to jump from left to right on the edges of the platforms to reach the exit. Sadly, the engine (which John said could DEFINITELY handle left/right gravity) did not like this idea. I wasn’t given the full explanation, but it would have taken a lot of time to mess with the engine to get this 1 level to work. Better solution was just to use a different level idea that didn’t make the original cut. One other level that we liked wound up not being nearly as fun in actuality as it was in my head… so again, we tweaked it… and now it’s one of my favorite levels.

Don’t rush the process. The first TITOL took John 12 hours, start to finish. So going in to this project, I thought it would take 2 or 3 days, tops, for this one. It’ll wind up being released on the morning of the 10th day. There’s a lot more extra features in this game, and my level designs are a bit more complex than what was in the first game. Combine that with the AS2 to AS3 conversion… and a 1-day game becomes a 2-week game. At the same time, you don’t want to take TOO much time… when you think everything has been found and is ready, let it loose. I’m really nervous that we’ve overlooked something, or some major bug will pop up as soon as it’s released… but, if that happens, we’ll know about it soon enough. Not much more we can do about it now.

Altogether, this was so much fun. I hope that all of you guys wind up enjoying the game as much as I’ve enjoyed working on it. And give insane props to John… all the little things he puts into games are what makes them great, not my level designs. The UI, the elephant, the polka music, and a dozen other things that I won’t mention so that you can discover them all tomorrow.

Today is the start of my 27th year on this planet. By conventional standards, that makes me 26. I’m not a big birthday person… but if I can use it to my advantage to get people to swoon over me, I guess that’s acceptable.

I love to make fun of people. I take great joy and pride in it. I routinely will mock someone for my own enjoyment, especially when I know they don’t understand the insult being flung at them. But, with that, I realize that I’d be nothing but a bully if I wasn’t able to take what I dished out. So, naturally, I attack myself as well. Pretty much, why should I be able to joke at the expense of others if I can’t joke at my own expense as well. From this (and from the beatings I took from my older brothers growing up), I have a pretty thick skin… I can’t recall the last time someone said something to me or about me that upset me.

Over the years, people have tried to take my username and warp it as a means of attacking me. It definitely doesn’t work… but I find the creativity humorous. Common examples include Tasshole and Asselfoot. The best one that I recall getting was from one of FFRs female mods who liked to drunk text me; so one evening after consuming a few adult beverages, I returned the favor… and woke up the next morning to a thread in the staff forum labeled “Sexual Harasselfoot”.

So, my friends and loyal readers… I challenge you to come up with the best wordplays involving my username. Please post them in the comments.

I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of doing videos in multiple segments. Because it’s a decision that has to be made on every game that I work on… and should be considered by anyone else who makes walkthroughs. There are a few choices: 1) Show the entire game in 1 video. 2) Split the game up into a few videos. 3) Do 1 video per level.

1 video per game:
-Simple. Viewers only need to click on 1 video, and they get everything they need. Can make it more difficult to find 1 specific level. May intimidate potential viewers by how long the video is or they may get bored and stop watching. Likely will only get 1 view/person out of the game. Non-partners capped at 11 minutes, so may need to edit out some content or speed up the footage.
-I recommend doing 1 video per game on very short games that do not have levels, specifically point and clicks and room escapes. I’ll also try to only do 1 video for games that I don’t think people will be very interested in and I can make them reasonable in length (ala Blox).

A few videos per game:
-This is what I like to do, when possible. You’re not going to upset your subscribers if you pump out 2-3 videos for 1 game. With a few videos, you can keep the length down while keeping the footage at 1x speed. You’ll also likely get multiple views per game this way. It’s a balance between being a greedy view whore and keeping your viewers happy and focused. Bite sized pieces, instead of everything at once.
-I try to do 2 videos for a game, ideally. As mentioned, it doesn’t make sense to do it with point and click type games… and some other types of games wouldn’t make sense to split the footage either. But most level-based games work to have the content split. They can find a specific level quickly if they want or get half the game in a few minutes. Multiple views per game is also very nice, but watch the greed.

1 video per level:
-Ultimate ease of finding the level you’re stuck on. Extremely short videos. Tons of views per person per game. Lots of extra time in editing, rendering, and uploading. Likely will piss off subscribers from the flood of videos at one time. A pain for users if they want to watch the entire game.
-I really don’t recommend doing this. It’s enough work to edit and upload 1 or 2 videos, but doing it for a game with 30 or 40 levels is just a royal headache. The times I’ve done 6-7 videos for 1 game have all resulted in me losing about 10 subscribers… people do not like getting flooded with content from 1 person. Sure, you’ll get extra views out of it, but is that worth the scorn of your viewers?

In the end, it’s about judgment. Different games make sense having different numbers of vids for them. To me, it’s common sense. But make sure to balance your desire for views with your audience’s wish for simplicity. I’d say to always err on the side of too few as opposed to too many. When I’ve done 6-7 videos per game, it was almost always out of greed, and it hasn’t worked out for me yet. I’ve really tried to stop doing that, and keep it to 4 videos max per game… ideally 2.