Languished Hesitation
👋🏻
Okay. I continued to play Alan Wake, beat it and its DLC just a couple days ago. I promise I am not diving into American Nightmare or Quantum Break...yet. Instead, I have jumped into another game off my goal list for 2025—Tunic. This is an extremely Max-coded game and I am very into its premise.
Of course, I am recording all of this gameplay for any potential future use. Who needs save data when you have 12~ hours of footage? At my usual 4K60, Alan Wake was beefy, taking up nearly half a terabyte. I can't sustain these files sizes. So I decided to run a test with Apple's Compressor. I kept the format, bit-depth, frame rate all the same. All I changed was the bit-rate from 80~ Mbit/s to 25Mbit/s. Wouldn't you know it? Cutting the bit rate by two-thirds cuts the file size by two-thirds!
A part of me feels like I should do this to all my footage and free up space on my 20TB drive. Maybe that can be a bit by bit project...
As for Ragnarök, this week I am staring down the draft and finishing it. I think it is okay to have a little gaming tangent. Alan Wake came at the right time for me. But I can't really let this script languish anymore.
I think part of my hesitation is that I think my original perspective is...wrong. Not so wrong that I have to scrap the essay or rewrite the entire thing, but my perspective has to shift. I wanted this to be more general game design talk about how Sony Santa Monica structured Ragnarök, but I think I need more of my perspective and experience in it than I anticipated. Maybe this will make for a better video in the end.
I want to wrap this draft up this week and poke my head around in my other outline for Memento and The Last of Us Part II. No ideas from Alan Wake...yet.
Until next time...
This letter is one block from the newsletter Memory Card by Max Roberts. Thoughts? Send me an email at max@maxfrequency.net.
Max is the writer and producer behind Max Frequency. cultivate and curate curiosity—both for himself and for others—by delighting in the details and growing greatness from small beginnings.
He's written a rich history and dive on the making of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II, celebrated the 15th anniversary of Super Smash Bros. Brawl with the voice behind its hype, and examined how Zelda "stole" Fortnite's best mechanic.
Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of his creative process for telling these stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made.
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