28.5 - Behind the Curtain

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To commemorate the first update in a post-Cohost world, I'm going to take a moment to talk about making this damn thing in the first place.

I know that these days most people interact with Let's Plays in a "background noise video" role, but if there's anyone like me out there, sometimes you don't want just background noise. You want something you can binge read that's interesting enough to keep your thoughts occupied away from the troubles of the world, tapping spacebar until it's time to click the "next chapter" link.

...No? Just me? Ah well, nevertheless.

As I note in the intro/TOC post, the screenshot/text LP is inherently better suited for long RPGs because I can more easily cut out all of the downtime and endless grind battles for your viewing pleasure. It lets me showcase chunks of the game more selectively, and also permits me room to go on long tangents or discuss things in more detail. Ordering screenshots is also certainly not as labor intensive as proper video editing (which is a skill I do not as of yet possess), but it was rather tedious to get it done back in the Cohost days.

The Process:

  1. Play a chunk of the game, recording it with OBS.
  2. Go back through the video, taking screenshots of everything that seems notable, including all the text boxes.
    1. If there's a sequence that warrants it, I'll take a .gif.
  3. I open up Obsidian and put the screenshots in a corner of my monitor so I can tab through them as I go.
  4. I write the update!
    1. I drag and drop screenshots into Obsidian, adding commentary and cringey jokes as I go. When there's too many text boxes in sequence, I'll transcribe the text instead.
    2. I copy-paste character portraits from earlier updates. I've got a master list of all of them, since if I dragged them in fresh each time they'll be duplicated in my attachments folder that many times.
      1. If need be, I'll crop a new portrait out of the game's files.
    3. Eventually, I hit a stopping point. Update done!
  5. On Cohost, I could copy-paste the text of the update into the post window. Obsidian is also in Markdown, which was quite helpful. But what about the images?
  6. The "Fun" Part.
    1. In Step 5, all the images would be copied into cohost as just their file names, but said files were timestamped screenshots.
    2. Cohost only let you upload four images at a time, so in a draft post, I'd do just that.
    3. In the saved draft, I'd pull down the image links, paste them into my HTML code to size them down for ease of reading, and paste that into the post by comparing the timestamps.
    4. Minus character portraits, an average update has somewhere around 200-ish images. Yes, I did it four a time the entire time.

I never asked, but I have a suspicion that perhaps I uploaded more image files onto Cohost than anyone else, even visual artists, just due to the sheer volume. I suppose now we'll never know.

Why do it this way? I had it in my head that because the LP was on Cohost, all the images should also be stored on Cohost. Great move in retrospect. Cohost's death took all the images with it; I had a ticking clock until the LP was gone forever.

Naturally, I procrastinated. Having the rug pulled out from under me like that was a real blow to motivation. Only as the hard deadline of the site's permanent death loomed did I roll up my sleeves and get to work.

The Reconstruction Process:

  1. Go into edit mode for every update on Cohost, copy the entire text, and paste it into a fresh Obsidian note.
    1. Because I used HTML to embed all the images, they still showed up visually in Obsidian. Genuinely quite convenient.
  2. I still have all the files on my computer, so... upload them on an image host elsewhere.
  3. Replace every single image URL in the HTML of every single update with the image's new URL from the hosting site.
    1. one
    2. by
    3. one

There were a couple tools I used that made this much easier, though the tedium could not be entirely removed. For character portraits - because they repeated perhaps dozens of times per update - I used a tool that let me run multiple find-replace searches simultaneously. I plugged in the code for every individual portrait, then just ran every single post through that.

I used another tool that added a prefix and suffix to every new line of text pasted into the box, which let me mass add the appropriate embed codes for an entire update's images at a time. On Cohost, I had the images set to show at 80% size, which looked about right to me based on the size of my window while browsing the site. Most of the updates on this site were set to 85%, because I figured the window here was bigger. But between Updates 19 and 20, I changed it from 85% to 65%, which I think is a much better size for readability. Alas, I don't think I'll go back and fix the rest.

From there, it was just going through one update at a time. I'd say replacing every image link for one update took somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot but was at the exact shitty cross-section of incredibly boring while also requiring a baseline of attentiveness. I'd usually do it while listening to a podcast or something.

As of me writing this, I haven't fully built a new update in a post-Cohost world, but I don't imagine it being too different of a process. At least I won't have to upload only four images at a time anymore!

Other weird notes:

I won't hold myself to a hard weekly release schedule anymore, but I'll try to keep the same broad pace going. If you got this far - and especially if you've actually read every single update - thanks, friend. See you again.

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