Here we are, the last of my promised posts from the end of last month. It took me a while to get here but it’s for the best, since every week along the way I’ve learned something new about dealing with trains in the Satisfactory game.
Thank goodness this is just a game, especially one where pesky issues like “gravity” and “structural integrity” don’t entirely matter to what you build.(more…)
I’m working on a tour video for our three-person co-op Satisfactory game. I recorded the footage Tuesday night. (We took the week off for various reasons, so I used that time to let the Space Elevator shipment production accumulate a bit.) For lack of anything better to do and not wanting to actually Do Game Stuff without the others, I started a video project.
Last night I completed the editing-down. Tonight I started the text overlay process, and decided I’d take this chance to learn something new (to me) in DaVinci Resolve: How to pin text to an object on the screen. Tracking, in other words.
It’s a learning process, but for the sake of this one joke I feel like it was worth it:
Yes, I used that garish color combination on purpose. I mean, why not?
Mind you, I could have used a fancier method and achieved smoother, better-looking results. But for a quick throw-away joke? It’s fine.
Hopefully I’ll have the full tour video up by the weekend.
Fifteen minutes to record, four hours to edit and add a slew of text cards, and half an hour to convince YouTube to post it and let me select a thumbnail of my own choosing instead of picking one of the three automated options.
My ongoing “save game” wherein I play with design elements and such is called “eSthetics” because I’m an absolute dork. I know, you’re all shocked & amazed.
I didn’t want the trouble of recording, cleaning up, and editing a voiceover track so the audio is just what’s in the game footage itself. Also, I thought the idea of going all “silent movie text gags” with title cards would be fun (and I was right). I’m not sure which method I’ll settle on if I do more of these, but I’m glad to get some practice under my belt with this particular style.
Forgive me, FICSIT Inc, for I have sinned. Instead of proceeding onward with my existing resource-harvesting goods-manufacturing project, I have started anew with a fresh world. Oddly enough, it looks almost exactly like the old one…
From such humble beginnings shall a continent-wide rail network grow.
All kidding aside, what happened? Trains happened. Which is to say, I decided that I wanted to take trains “seriously” and make a proper rail network. (My previous savegame ended up more devoted to drones than trains, and that went… only partly well.) In order to make a rail network possible in that save, though, would’ve involved ripping out almost everything I’d already built. Ha ha, no thank you.
Update 6’s new skybox is amazing. Absolutely amazing. And the game was already extremely pretty before!
So here I am, climbing the tech tree again. Grubbing around for every blade of grass and stick of wood to power my meager collection of equipment. Fighting off the hostile fauna with an electrically-charged stick. And so forth.
Current status: I sent off my first Space Elevator shipment, unlocked coal power, and have accumulated enough material to commence building my first actual power plant.
There are reasons not to start near what I call Iron Heights in the northern forest, but they aren’t particularly compelling reasons, let’s be honest.
I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.
This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.
At any rate, here you go:
All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.
It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.
