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Last month, I said that if This is Dragon Country got more views than Pitfall, brought in a lot more Patreon Support, or the channel as a whole made enough ad revenue to break even for the month, I’d work on another 50 Ways to Live video in September. Unfortunately, none of those things happened. I won’t lie, the failure of the last two 50 Ways to Live videos was a huge blow to my morale. Their increasing success was the first sign of growth this channel’s seen since 2021 and represented most of my hopes for bringing it back to life. Now that their rising star seems to have faded, the situation seems as bleak as it did at the beginning of the year.
But although it feels like we’re back to square one, it’s important to remember that we’re still in a better position now than we were back in February. In my original estimation, the channel was supposed to run out of funds tomorrow. But now, thanks mostly to you Patrons, the bleeding of the channel’s savings has slowed to the point where my latest estimation says we still have 11 months left on the day before my original projected Dooms Day.
So, as I said I would last month if the next 50 Ways video failed, I spent September working on 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring. I picked up where I left off, learning some of the modding skills I expected I’d need to make Elden Ring machinima. I learned how to import skeleton animation files from Elden Ring into Blender, modify enemy ai to only do specific attacks, edit Elden Ring meshes and materials, spawn NPCs in Elden Ring, write lua scripts in cheat engine, use them to force NPCs to play specific animations in-game, and other things like that. I also came up with more funny ways to die. I’ve got more than 60 of them now, which is more than enough for the video, but I still feel that the list needs a great one to end the video with.
Now that October’s here, though, it’s time to switch back to 50 Ways to Live in Minecraft. I have no idea what I’m going to make for this one, but I’m probably going to try something Halloween themed. Also, I might announce when the video is going to go live ahead of time, because one of the reasons I suspect the last two 50 Ways to Live videos didn’t do so well is because of their lower initial click-through rate compared to the previous three. If more of my subscribers know when the video’s coming out ahead of time, maybe enough of them will make a point of clicking on it when it first comes out to drive up the click-through rate and get the algorithm to pay more attention to it.