Videos sometimes come out of nowhere. At no point did I ever really plan on looking at Dog of Bay, but after getting asked by the translator, Cargodin, to do some play testing, I liked it even before the English subtitles had made it in the builds I was playing.
Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet.
I don’t expect the video will do well. For something like this, I think any video talking about it in the context of a new Fan Translation will probably do much better. Though I do hope whoever gets the most eyes on the game going forward does so with caring about the game itself.
My main challenge with the video beyond trying to be time sensitive is that, despite Dog of Bay being primarily a game of presentation, I feel there isn’t much for me to work with. You saw most of the game in my video, and I can’t really edit around that. I ended up leaving most of the visuals intact since it already aligns with the music, and I just tried to pace my voice to fit each segment generally. I think it worked overall, and adding some animations on top helped break up the video’s pacing while retaining the look and feel of Dog of Bay’s gameplay in between them.
Anyways, I did want to talk about some stuff that I think worked and didn’t with this video.
Bad
I always kind of like starting with the bad usually. End on a high note.
- The script is a little undercooked. If you don’t know, historically, I’ve obsessed over scripts to get every word and sentence to convey what I want properly. It’s a huge time sink that, I think, most people don’t really notice. So I’ve been trying to cut back on this since often it can result in me spending 80% of my time to make the script only 1-5% better.The script for this video was drafted in 3 hours, with another 2 or 3 hours dedicated to editing. But as I started finishing the video, I noticed some things I would have caught if I spent a few extra hours on it.
The claim about early PS2 rhythm games exploring what a home console rhythm game is shaky at best. I feel like most modern rhythm games are centered around enthusiast players who take rhythm games more seriously for score chasing; at the time, home console games probably just weren’t necessarily looking to chase that. Either way, I deflected from my authority in the script, so I felt OK just leaving that as is. Also, Space Channel 5, while on PS2, is a Dreamcast game first. Yet I use that for most of my examples in the video. Fixing this kind of stuff after the audio is edited is really tough.
Also, I worry I painted the characters a little more depressed than they come off. Each character has a past they have to wrestle with, but the characters themselves still come off as optimistic about life and at least have positive feelings about their time at the bar. After the video was done, I expressed this concern to Cargodin, but she said she thought I was adequate in my explanation. So hopefully, I’m just overly worried about it.
Either way, I think most of those issues are acceptable, given the tight turnaround.
- Some graphics I used were a bit undercooked regarding how they moved. This was my first time editing a complicated video using Davinci Resolve instead of Sony Vegas, so it was a learning process for things as simple as putting the OCP backgrounds behind gameplay and moving all the little characters around. Given how silly and dumb they’re supposed to be, maybe they fit the tone of the animations anyways.
I also could have used more visual variety when explaining the game, but it all came together in the moment, so swapping them out later was a bit tougher, given the time constraints.
- If you really wanna get in to stats, retention was down for some reason on the video. I mostly ignore this metric since the ways to improve it often feel disruptive to the video itself (teaser intros, sudden changes in visuals, etc.) Most of my videos usually keep 25-35% of the audience by the end, which is supposedly not great. But for the type of video I make, I don’t know any real tactics to improve that.
Good
- One of my fears in my videos that focus on changing how we look at games is that it comes off as aggressive toward the viewer. I don’t want to blame you for how you look at or feel about games or tell you that your view isn’t valid.I was happy I could use my personal experience with X-Play’s Dog of Bay coverage to emphasize how I feel I’ve bettered and recognized a flaw in myself, without blaming them. Hopefully, my failure is a lesson you can learn from that impacts not only how you look at Dog of Bay but any game with similar surface-level issues.
- Dog of Bay killed another video. I originally planned to make a video about the Bourbon Snack Company metaverse, a silly little ad campaign metaverse for the bourbon snack company. The message of that video was going to be, “Hey, this is just marketing; it’s not that weird.” And the ampm mascot mention, I think, is a remnant of that.In reality, it probably didn’t make much sense, given that there isn’t much game to the Bourbon Metaverse. When I first started working on the Dog of Bay video, I didn’t realize it was killing that one. But toward the end, I found Dog of Bay better served that purpose and thematically fit it very nicely. But I only realized that toward the end of the video editing process of the Dog of Bay video.
As a homage, I did include a bit of the Bourbon Metaverse in the opening of this video. We’ll see if it comes back in any other form. I checked in the other night, and the portal you find at the end of the metaverse for the Events said, “Coming Soon.” So maybe something’s still there.
- I initially included more visual gags in the video, but I think there were too many. Thankfully, I could edit out most of the ones I thought were oversaturating the video. I think the final product is a good balance, given how little else there was I could work with from the game itself.
- Tamsoft, as well as Cavia, worked on Dog of Bay. There also were some really popular voice actors in Japan who voiced the characters. It’s tempting to take that information and include it in the video, especially when a name like Cavia has a cult-like following after the success of NieR. The reality is, none of those details helped convey my message, nor were really relevant to what I liked about Dog of Bay. Though arguably, you could say the quality of voice actors helps emphasize the tone of the game.In general, I’ve really been cutting a lot of those “did you know” kinds of facts from videos unless I have a specific purpose for them, such as talking about the NieR franchise and the handoff from Cavia to Platinum in the Babylon’s Fall video. That showed that the systems of that game were more or less adopted from a series they also adopted. Or something like Hunex’s long-term interest in auto-RPGs. That would be relevant when talking about a lot of their games from the late 90s and early 2000s.
At this moment, I think it’s a good video. It tackled the struggle I’ve been having with my other scrapped videos as well–balancing talking about the game itself while trying to say something about how we look at games. I don’t want a video to be too much about me, but I also don’t want to look at a game in a purely review/summary format.
Finding that middle point has been a challenge, but Dog of Bay was a relatively successful first swing at something like that. However, given the limited amount of content in the game, I think the hurdle wasn’t as high.
