Why blog posts?
Sure, “Everyone else does it!” was a small argument. But mainly, we saw the need for a heartbeat, something that our viewers could look at and say, “Hey, they’re still alive!”, and feature-length videos are an exhausting way to do that.
These blog posts won’t replace videos at all. Every update gets a video; we’ll continue to produce content based on the game such as the tournaments and the analyses. This is something entirely new that we couldn’t do in the form of a video.
Hold on, this isn’t Leo
Indeed, dewayx here. I have been an advisor to the team for 10 months now. I’m helping with the Don’t Die To Stupid Stuff of game development and project management, and I also help with the talent search.
Here’s the catch with our entire operation: The project stands and falls with one man, Léo. He’s behind every major feature, the voice and face of all videos, and still does a lot of the management and business. But increasingly, to make progress on the game, he actually needs to work on the game. Video editors like Skarix and “Everything Man” Alex ease the burden on Leo, but that’s only the first step.
And so, I’ve been given the responsibility of getting this started and introducing a new way of working as a whole to The Bibites.
From humble, and humiliating beginnings
When they approached me with the question, “How can we give more back to our viewers without overworking ourselves?”, we all knew this would stay a question for a long time. We tried:
- Less editing
- More editing
- Less frequent videos
- More frequent videos
- Less game update videos
- More game update videos
- “What if we made filler videos”
- “What if we used shorts”
- “What if we focused more on the game”
- “Okay but hear me out – second tournament”
But in the end, the choice between fast, cheap and good left meant that we had to admit to ourselves: YouTube and videos in general are not an easy-going way to geek out about the game we love. It’s like shouting a love letter, to a bibite, in morse code, through bamboo pipe.
If all the things we want to talk about require Leo to voice them, he doesn’t work on the game.
Settling on blog posts wasn’t easy
When YouTube is everything you know, every solution looks like a video. It took weeks of discussion to settle on the details of how we’re going to do this.
First up, the immediate plan is to post a small summary, teaser, announcement wombo-combo post to YouTube’s “new” community posts feature for every blog post we put on here.
Second, we’ll take it eeeaasy. If we’re all on vacation or conference you’ll still get a “no time for meetings, but the weather here is nice” ping that we’re alive, taking care of our mortal shells, and will be back to active development in no time at all.
That’s our promise: No more dark ages.
Transparency as a core philosophy
Over time, I will write less and less of the posts. I lay the blog post eggs and simply salute as my plentiful r-selected blog post children speed off into a new fertility zone.
The goal is, that everyone on the team and contributors who made something and wants to tell the world, has an outlet for that. And for you, to be informed about a feature by the exact people who implemented a feature. No middleman, no censorship, no filter.
Yes, this has been done before. We take great inspiration in this matter from Factorio, Stardew Valley, Thrive, and other games. They all reached a steady state of regular, casual articles about development and features, that don’t burn out their developers.
We write what comes natural, flows from our little raccoon fingers, without forcing anyone to do anything.