Yes

Thanks Vincent! I think I'm going to try doing quality over quantity for 2022 so I do appreciate your comment.

​@@NESAtlas I wonder by the way, if I'm not too inquisitive: I looked all the comments of the felix video and no one seems to have asked you: what made you stop making videos for 4 years ?

Back then I had been making these videos on a laptop with an external hard drive and an old version of After Effects. I think I damaged the drive by dropping it on the floor which means I lost all of my work on 2 videos that were nearly complete (SMB2 & Paperboy). That was kind of devastating so I took a break that lasted much longer than I expected. Eventually, I built a nice desktop PC and tried out the latest version of After Effects with Felix being a kind of test run to see if I still had it in me. Since then, I have been feeling more and more excited to keep the channel going especially after meeting a lot of fans of these videos on Twitch! What keeps me going is definitely people like you who keep coming back for more 🙂

@@NESAtlas How did you manage to do the top and bottom of the blue tower at 9:10 ? And how about all those cogwheels at 13:00 ? This looks insane now that I rewatch it ! Perhaps that insane that you gave up doing it again at 13:38 ? And what about the shadows at 16:00 ? That one looks even more incredible.

​@@vincentmartin3390 The leaning tower was actually pretty easy by simply applying a rotation on the map image in sync with the gameplay. The important part is to rotate around the exact center of the screen and also making sure to not allow pixel anti-aliasing. The cogwheels were definitely a big pain to deal with, but what I did was create a looping animation for each gear-type, then I duplicated them over and over while manually lining them up on the original map. And yes, I didn't do it again on the second section since it took me a week just to do the first 😅 The shadows was another easy one. I made a layer to match the shadow pattern with solid black, then adjusted that black layer's opacity to 50% which essentially cut the RGB color values of the map in half. I think it matched the original footage so well because the game code is also dropping color values by 50% when a shadow passes over the background layers. I have been thinking about doing a full "How It's Made" type of video on this one since there were so many tools & techniques used that I bet some people may find the whole creation processing interesting.

I think you are right about the background layer at 4:20 and emulators actually allow you to set a custom background color which I can key out so it won't just be black. For the boss fight at 11:24, it definitely was not trivial as I had to handle the individual cloud layers separately (this took me many hours). That's also why I skipped doing it a second time near the end of the game 😅 It has been almost a year since my last video so I'm overdue for another one. I have a few in mind as well as wanting to test out a new technique that wouldn't require doing all of this work manually so I need to explore that for a bit first. If it works out, then I could potentially eliminate the most time consuming part of making these videos! I have also been doing more livestreaming on Twitch lately as well which is a fun distraction for me. I also would like to do a proper "Making-of" style video which would be perfect for Castlevania: Bloodlines since I used so many different editing techniques to put it all together. I think it could be interesting for those wanting to learn more about how these are made.

It's complicated. This channel has always been a labor of love and I am still very much into retro gaming. Practically all of my hobbies revolve around this stuff! It's just that I mostly spend my time watching or streaming retro games on Twitch. I have met a lot of cool people there (including a bunch of people from these comments!) and it's been a very positive experience for me. I am still planning on doing a new video sometime this year as I'd love to hit 10,000 subscribers. I get the feeling though that there aren't any more major milestones that I can reasonably hit going forward. Either way, I will never want to give up on this channel as it's probably the coolest idea I ever came up with 😄