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Making YouTube Lets Plays

How many YouTube Lets Play series are you currently recording?

Today's Date is: March 12, 2017

YouTube Lets Plays:
How Many Series Do You Do At Once?

Today's YouTube Lets Plays question comes from Reddit:

How many series are you recording? from letsplay

While my original answer to this question appeared on the Reddit thread linked above, my answer here is longer and has more detail then the one posted on the YouTube Lets Plays Reddit forums.

YouTube Lets Plays: 
How Many Series Do You Do At Once?
My Answer:

My channel is mostly a vlogging channel. When it comes to YouTube Lets Plays, I do almost exclusively Witcher & modded Don't Starve challenge runs, with a few Otomes and random indie games here and there.

I have 3 YouTube Lets Play series that I do regular.

• The Witcher (daily)
• Don't Starve (weekly)
• Oxygen Not Included (I've just added this 3rd one.)

Don't Starve & Oxygen Not Included are YouTube Lets Plays that I do weekly, so one episode of each series each week. Some weeks I do 2 each for no reason at all.

With the Don't Starve let's plays I do modded challenge runs. Custom settings at insanely hard levels - monsters turned up to the max, nights set to super long,- barely able to survive 3 nights a a result; I test out mods for workshop creators, looking for glitches and trying to make them crash. So my Don't Starve runs are super glitchy, with high rates of game crashes.

I test out fan created mods and play until I die - usually I last 1 to 2 hours before dying. I do about 2 of these a week. The only game I play more then Witcher, and a game that I'll likely keep releasing weekly for years to come.

When not testing out new mods for workshop creators, I tend to do challenge runs with the "Markimod, Markiplier & Friends Mod" edition, or the Disc World Mod or the Sonic The Hedgehog mod. The episodes don't continue, I do the whole run in a single video, so it could be as short as 15 minutes or as long as 4 hours depending on how long I can keep the character alive.

For The Witcher, I do ALMOST daily YouTube Lets Plays. I try to upload one every day, but I miss a few days here and there. My current focus is a Completionist Blind Run Playthough of the entire Witcher Franchise, played in order (1, 2, &3 + the 2 official DLCs and the 21 fan created Adventure Mods) (from the way I play it, is should take me 700 episodes of 2 hours per episode to get to the end of the series); releasing these about 4 episodes a week. I'm doing every quest, every side quest, talking to every NPC, picking every plant, exploring every nook and cranny - absolute total completionist, which the game devs said takes 1,200 hours to do .

This series is obviously going to continue on a weekly basis for then next 3 or 4 years before I get to the end of it, but I'm insanely in love with this game and obsessed with it enough so that I could easily play this game only for the rest of my life and never play another game ever again.

I got 50+ episodes recorded, 20+ currently released, and should only take me another 700 episodes to finish.

So it'll be almost the only let's plays on my channel for about the next 4 years, LOL! I've not yet started it yet, but I'll also be doing challenge runs, modded challenges, and fan made adventure mods for the Witcher series as well.

Because I'm used to doing a lot of reading, I read every thing, all of it, every last word. Like in Witcher when he can go to the book seller and buy hundreds of books - I read every single page of every single book, then read all his journal entries he wrote and all the note he takes about people and monsters he meets.... it should take 40 hours to get through Witcher, but I'm 109 hours into it and only in the 3 chapter (out of 7 chapters) and it's largely due to my taking the time to read every last anything that can be read.

I love the story behind the Witcher series and most gamers skip past it to the action; there's not much action in my Witcher game plays - I've turned Geralt into a pigeon chasing bookworm that runs from monsters, LOL! (I discovered if you get the monsters to chase you, you can run to the nearest guard post and the solders will fight the monster for you, while Geralt stands there and watches) (Wait til I get to Witcher 3, where you can buy pink dye and dye his armour pink - Geralt is gonna be so bright pink when I get that far into the game.)

I just recorded 50 YouTube Lets Plays episodes of Witcher, each episode 2 hours long, in a single session... yes, I did not get much sleep. Right now I'm 109 hours into the game, stopping every 2 hours for 15 minute breaks, stopping every 8 hours for 2 hour naps. Basically it's a Witcher marathon going on here (not sure what else you could call it). And while each 2 hour episode is being released once a day (which will result in 5 months of daily videos) the entire recording is being done in a single week. 

... I have become so obsessed with this game. I've never had a game draw me in like this before.

I'm absolutely completely obsessed with Don't starve & Witcher, so I focus almost all of my game play exclusively on those 2 games. So while my channel does feature quite a lot of games, sporadically popping into the mix, over all the gaming section of my channel is devoted almost exclusively to these 2 games only, with me playing other games more as a way to take a break, rather them me playing them as a series.

I've got several other YouTube Lets Plays that are "on going series" I do. Meaning, I don't play them on a regular scheduled. Just play them when I feel like it, resulting in there may be a week of a new episode every day, followed by a few months of no episodes, then an episode a week for a few months. Etc. I'm not sure how many there are. Let's count them here. 

The ones I do like this are:

• Magicka
• Reigns
• HuniePop
• Slime Rancher
• Dandelion
• Hatoful Boyfriend
• Magic Islands
• Battle For Blood
• Emperor: The Rise of The Middle Kingdom
• Age of Mythology
• Rise of Nations
• Little Inferno
• World of Goo
• Euro Truck Simulator 2

So that is 14, but I feel like I've forgotten a couple of them.

So all total, I have 17 YouTube Lets Plays series that I am currently doing: 1 daily, 2 weekly, and 14 that are added to whenever I feel like it, usually at a rate of 2 or 3 videos total per month (not 2 or 3 of each game, but 2 or 3 total out of all 14 games combined. Thus some games end up with months between episodes.)

I record in 8 to 10 hour sessions per day, one game per sitting, usually 3 or 4 days in a row of a single game, then schedule it out so that it takes 2 or 3 months for the entire set to be released. I usually have my Let's Plays scheduled out so far in advance, that the date I played the game is 3 to 5 months before the date it gets published.

For example I recorded 40 episodes of Reigns YouTube Lets Plays in one 3 day sitting of 8 hours each day. I did that in October 2016. Then I scheduled it so only 1 episode was published each week. We are now in February 2017 and episode 20 just went live this week, yet I had recorded it back in October.

Doing it this way, allows me to take off weeks in a row of doing no game plays at all, because I have my videos pre-made so far in advance. I like having my videos scheduled for daily releases, scheduled out several weeks in advance, that way if I get sick (my health is not good) have another extended hospital stay, etc, I won't have to worry about a space of time with no daily videos.

I started doing this because I had a full month of no videos in 2016 because of hospitalization and want to be prepared for such things in the future, so I will not have spaces of no video releases again.

At the end of it all, the gaming section of my channel (my channel has way more vlogs then games) is predominately Witcher, Witcher, Witcher, and a lot more Witcher, to the point of almost being a "one game channel devoted to Witcher", with weekend breaks to play Don't Starve. And 1 or 2 or 3 monthly breaks of random other (mostly indie) games.

I could actually see my channel evolving over time into becoming just a Witcher & Don't Starve exclusive YouTube Lets Plays gaming channel... it's moving in that direction right now.

This article was originally written on: March 12, 2017

This page last updated on: March 12, 2017