🏆 What's the best thing you ever made?

Time for another podcast from the hotel where I'm being held captive!

From my little kitchenette, let's discuss:

1. The best thing you ever made (and why it doesn't define you)
2. You didn't miss the boat
3. Sometimes 3 hours is all you need (to make substantial progress)
4. Build new features alongside old ones

📺 Watch the video

🎙️ Listen to the podcast

Here it is on Spotify. (This is the part of the newsletter where I complain that the Spotify embed code doesn't work.)

🔗 Show notes

• How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself
• Joshua Morse
• Simple Stomp
• Diabolical Experiments
• Frozen Karma

🧪 Experiment time!

I ran an experiment. Instead of just recording audio for this episode, I also recorded video in portrait mode so that I could crank out a few TikTok videos:

• What's the best thing you ever made?
• You didn't miss the boat!
• Give your project 3 hours!

Why not, right?

In the podcast I talk about how you didn't miss the boat, and sometimes with TikTok I feel that I might have: the "heyday" where you can just show up and amass huge views on your videos is essentially over, and the US government is trying to ban American access to the app.

It can also be discouraging to see only a few hundred views on several videos.

So has the ship sailed; did I actually miss the boat?

🔑 The key is not giving up

Would you keep going if you only had 74 subscribers after your first 100 videos?

I don't know that I would. After posting 54 videos, the Valadria YouTube channel sits at "only" 2,152 subscribers. Even a couple thousand subscribers makes me feel like I haven't done enough, haven't seen enough growth.

But perseverance is the key, the core differentiator between good and great.

Guess who did keep going with only 74 subs after 100 videos ... OK I'll just tell you:

Marques Brownlee, also known as MKBHD.

Marques Brownlee's YouTube channel geared towards "quality tech videos" currently sits at over 18 million subscribers. How'd he do it? I have some thoughts:

1. Marques clearly has a natural charisma and talent for making videos
2. His focus, new tech gadgets, gives him an endless source for new material
3. New tech gadgets are also often inherently exciting to other consumers
4. Perhaps most importantly, he has significant stamina and determination

Without wanting to give TikTok a try as a creator, I'd probably never have first given it a try as a consumer, and wouldn't have been exposed to fascinating videos like this one about MKBHD. Even if TikTok isn't the perfect place for me to grow as a creator, it's given me new perspective and motivation to continue on other platforms (like Twitter and YouTube), where my particular skills are a better fit.

Anyway, don't stop posting. Keep learning, keep experimenting, keep going.

🛑 Don’t Stop Posting

Don’t stop posting! In The New Internet, it’s never been more important to keep posting, to keep getting the word out about your game.

ValadriaMatt Hackett

🎧 How to do GDC is now in podcast form

It's funny how one tiny thing can completely derail you. Normally I cross-post my podcast/videos across YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else, but in How to do GDC I accidentally said something problematic for audio-only shows:

Here's what the cards looked like that we used back in my Lost Decade Games days, and then here's my most recent business cards that I used for Valadria.

I think that's the only part that doesn't work as audio-only. That one part made me want to skip uploading as a podcast entirely, but after some encouragement from the Valadria Discord community, I made a quick edit and uploaded the podcast!

Sometimes it just takes a gentle nudge and a simple fix to push forward.