Behind The Scenes: "Getting Started With OpenTTD 12.1"

This one was somewhere between a nightmare and a rush job. I thought I'd completed editing at 1am on the day it went live, but then realised the finished video was missing a couple of inserts and only managed to set the final render going with less than two hours left before it needed to go live. What do you mean, "HD Processing"?

This is mainly because I hadn't recorded a video which required reading from a script at the same time I gathered gameplay footage before. To make things more complicated, these were some of the longest takes I've ever had to record in a scripted video. You'll spot that I couldn't quite sustain that length of recording, and have the occasional vocal flub. Which I left in because... yay, standards!

(Well. More because these kind of version-specific tutorials are a bit time sensitive. There's no point releasing a tutorial for the new 12.1 UI if a new version is just around the corner.)

I think this might count as a "face reveal" video? The weird thing is I'd already recorded the first video which features me on camera a few weeks before, but the joy of schedules means that one won't go out until late November. I hope you enjoy it when it lands; it's very silly and maybe a little bit controversial, and absolutely nothing to do with my usual retro PC and strategy game content.

I'm a bit annoyed with the amount of room echo and generally bad audio in the to-camera bits. My computer room does have to remain a vaguely normal and usable room so I don't have the luxury of coating it in foam tiles, but maybe I can buy some of those art prints made of sound-absorbing stuff to help tame the reverberation a bit. Or buy a lavelier mic, which would also let me do on-location video should I find anything that's interesting to shoot on-location stuff for.

I used my webcam for the to-camera bits and it's OK-not-great - the stuff with proper cameras looks better but setting up focus is an utter pain and I needed to quickly grab footage for this one.  The biggest problem was having my gaze distracted by my monitor! For the outro video I had to drape an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt over it to stop me glancing in that direction whenever something moved on screen. There was a lot of deleted footage of me swearing at myself for constantly looking away from the camera.

In the outro I'm kneeling on one of those inflatable exercise balls to line up at the right height, angle and distance from the camera. You may notice the subtle bouncing if you watch closely.

The sudden vocal style switch at 30 seconds in between the to-camera section and the bit talking over the menu is something I really dislike. In future videos I want to get the gap in sound between the longer distance to-camera pieces and the gameplay footage a lot smaller.

The car shown when I say "road vehicles" is my own Vauxhall Omega, which I owned between 2005-2009. It also appears in Timberwolf's Road Vehicles, which is why that particular minicab has some very non-minicab performance statistics!

If I do the tutorial again I'll spend less time talking about the climates. I realised if I tried to fix everything I don't like I'd never get the thing released, but I feel this falls into the "experiment with this once you've played a couple of games" camp, and doesn't need anything more detailed than telling people to click Temperate first time round.

One revision of the script had a longer section where I expanded the signal menu and made a few references to the block-vs.-path controversy. In the end I decided to scrap that and go with just showing new players the signal menu as it appears by default. Tutorials showing the "old" menu with all the different signal types has been a huge source of confusion for new players, one of the most common new player questions at the time of recording was variants on, "Master Hellish/LugnutsK has all these signals on their tutorial video and I only have four, what am I doing wrong?"

Yes, this will probably result in several multi-paragraph comments from people angry that I didn't mention block signals, to which my pre-emptive reply is, "there are thousands of genuine societal troubles in this world and yet the thing you chose to get really invested in is which type of pixelated signal someone puts next to their simulated railway track. Why not try redirecting that energy into trans rights or at least keeping your local foodbank topped up?"

I also didn't expect to return to OpenTTD quite so soon, but conversations on Discord suggested a tutorial that wasn't showing an old user interface from 2 or 3 versions ago was needed, and maybe that it shouldn't come from someone with an ulterior motive of Make People Use The Coop Signals So We Can Have Them Back In The Menu. (Instead, you get my ulterior motive which is a baseline assumption the people who've been developing this game the last decade or so probably have a good idea what's best for it. Believe me, it breaks my muscle memory too from time to time. I get over it.) Plus I guess I'm overdue one of these Subscriber Milestone things.

Remember, if anyone asks you to pay for OpenTTD... it's a scam! But you can donate if you want to.