At the very end of last year I uploaded a members-only video to my YouTube channel titled "Changing My Perspective" that went over some thoughts I had regarding the future of my channel and things about myself I believed I needed to work on. 

A lot of what I said in that video still rings true. Some of what I touched on has been in-place for a while now. Some of it, I still need to work on. 

The first part of this year I had two main focuses. One was giving the "podcast" idea I had a real shot. The other was making the best video I could possibly make in Doki Doki Panic. 

The podcast has been a bit of a grind, but I would consider it a success. People seem to enjoy it and it's not too much effort to maintain. It's given me a lot of additional thumbnail experience, and it's been a nice outlet to chase topics that have more virility and temporary appeal. 

The Doki Doki video on the other hand made me take a step back to think. 

It was a success (in my mind) because I give it my all and I'm really proud of how it turned out. But it didn't really move the needle or grow the channel. Additionally, this whole year I've seen considerable fewer trickle-in views from my older videos. 

This isn't a post to complain about views. I'm still extremely happy with where my channel is, even if it appears a little dormant at the moment. I only bring them up because it really made me take a step back and try to be honest about what I want from my channel. 

In that "Changing My Perspective" video I referenced earlier, that was a major theme. "What is it that I really want out of my channel?" "What can I do to ensure I can continue making everything I want to make?"

For the first half of the year, it was keeping my nose to the grindstone on Doki Doki Panic. It was taking zero shortcuts. It was raising the bar for my Retro Odyssey series. When I'd start to think about time tables and views I'd just shut that out and tell myself to just focus on getting the video done — if I could just get the video done everything else would work itself out. 

Doki Doki Panic had my most successful ever day 1. But it fell off just a few days later. It didn't reach as many people as my past three videos. As of writing this, it's still not quite at 10k views. 

Now, talking about it in that way it may seem like that is disappointing to me. 

It's actually not that bad.

But it ties back into that question: What do I want from my channel?

How can I make more?

I love my Retro Odyssey series. I'm really proud of what I've created. I'm doing things I've never attempted before in the next episode, Simon's Quest. I'm still excited about it and have no plans to stop.

But I know that this series on it's own will not take me to where I want to go with this long of a turnaround time between episodes. At a certain point, once you have what you want creatively, the bottleneck isn't quality it's quantity. Success (in numbers) comes from increasing your output.

There are certainly different kinds of success, though. High view counts don't necessarily translate to "clout"

The saying "game recognizes game" rings true here, and while I'm still below 10K subscribers, I feel like I've been blessed with an amazing community of people that enjoy and respect what I work so hard to make. That feeling is exhilarating. It makes me want to keep pushing to improve my videos.

"Improving" your quality and production value doesn't always make sense though in terms of growth. The quality of my videos and the integrity of the process I employ when making them have been more important to me than raw growth though. But I do want to grow. I need to, in fact, to make the career change I made at the end of 2022 make sense financially. 

I haven't spoken about this to subscribers or even most of my close friends, but I haven't been doing well financially. I've been barely scraping by. I had been able to cover most everything for myself and my family up until a few months ago, but I found myself slipping into the negative. From paycheck-to-paycheck to slightly below that. I had to get a second job delivering subs for Jimmy John's to try and dig myself out of this hole and provide for my family. 

It's a bizarre feeling sometimes, because I thought I was past having to do this sort of thing. But it's the choice that I made and I still don't regret it. I still believe things will get better. And that's part of what led me to this new strategy I'm working to implement by the time my Simon's Quest video launches.

So here's where things stand right now.

I love my channel and I love Retro Odyssey and I want to continue making it. I'm proud of myself for launching my sticker line, and I'm glad I took the time to create this website. The podcast is going well, and we just got monetized, so the work is paying off already over there. 

I want HPRshredder to grow though. I want to make more videos so I can grow, but I don't want to sacrifice the quality of them. 

After months of chewing on this, here's what I've come up with. 

I'm going to be launching two new series to run alongside Retro Odyssey. 

One of them is retro-focused, more in line with what you would expect from me, but more casual. Less cuts. Not trying to push the envelope as much, but still with CRT shots and decent photography. 

The other is more 00s to modern gaming focused. Shorter videos somewhat in line with the Dark Souls video I released a few years back that either focus on specific points I want to make about specific games, or that focus on aspects of certain games I find to be beautiful.

These series will run alongside Retro Odyssey and the aim will be to have one of each in-between Retro Odyssey episodes. The goal being to have a video out every six weeks or so instead of every six months. 

I'm not quite ready to unveil the full details of these, but I am at a point now where I'm comfortable enough letting those interested know this is my current plan. 

For me, I like this strategy because it allows me more time to cook with my main videos while giving me more room to experiment with other formats and post more frequently, which I believe is the biggest barrier holding my channel back. 

Communication has been slow on my part since Doki Doki Panic, but I do update things every session over on the podcast channel. I just wanted to hold out until I was really ready to talk about this stuff for my main channel. 

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it. ❤