Changes to the Empire

Hey Everyone! 

There are some changes coming to the YouTube channel that I personally think are for the better and go towards supporting the Empire as a whole. We will have a bit of a history lesson and how everything has evolved leading up to this point but first let's get into these changes and what it means for the content you are used to seeing.

Going forward the 2 hour Focus streams and Discord Critiques will be archived on Patreon for all tiers. They will still be on Twitch for 14 to 60 days depending on your account type with twitch. With these changes I also would like to start post update videos on what we are working on in the stream as well as 2 or 3 things that I did that I think are important to know or note down. That update video will be for everyone on YouTube. Some extra details- the current videos on YouTube will not be removed and will continue to not be monetized by YouTube commercials.

The idea is that the quality of the content for the channel will go up as you will get more focused and shorter videos overall allowing for more learning and workflow concepts faster. The YouTube channel will continue to not be monetized as the way to support what I am doing via Twitch, donation, or Patreon.

I wanted to get that out in front of this video but if you want to understand the history and how got here then enjoy my history lesson.

The original design of the channel was to be a place for an archive of the past streams. The reason for doing this is Twitch removes VODS after a set amount of time. As of the posting of this video it is 14 days and if you're a Twitch Partner, Twitch Prime, and Twitch Turbo users have the VODS for 60 days. Keeping the videos somewhere was something I wanted to do.

The videos were 2 hours long since taking the time to edit the videos would have insane overhead that I just didn't want to commit. I started Separating out the Portfolio reviews which on average are about 15 min long as well as the Discord Critiques which as of today are 2 hours long.

In come the Empire Partners. They are still independent; we are just collecting together to bring more learning to you.

Starting with Alex Beddows. He brings an amazing Podcast to the channel and became a welcome addition to the flow of content brought with GDD (Game Dev discussion) He brings an enjoyable conversation when it comes to the things that we need to know or topics hard to discuss that are brought to the surface.

With me and countless others in the Empire discord switching to blender it became obvious to have Lukas Stratmann making tutorials and bringing his long-term knowledge to our hungry blender brains.

Michael Kinsey has also joined with his strong technical understanding of all things game development to also bring blender videos while expanding his network with us.

Just as an extra note. These guys are also going to be producing anything they think is useful. They can make videos on Unreal or Substance designer. Anything these three have brought to the table has and will continue to be of value to us as artists learning to be better artists.

Looking at these videos and the formats they have taken, the YouTube channel is needing a refocus towards supporting that pattern. Now you might understand why the change is needed. We have much more focused content on specific examples and the VODs don't really fit within that so it must evolve. As I said earlier, I would like to continue posting updates on the project from the stream in the form of where we are at and tours of things within the project. Combined with that If there was anything, I think should be covered workflow wise or how to do something I will also add it to the update video.

I hope this is something we can all value change wise and that it gets you the learning you want quicker. 

Until next time!

DiNusty <3