Lots of Video News!

I’ve been incredibly happy with the very early success and interest with the videos produced the past couple weeks… Both of them. While I think the attention received may have been oddly disproportionate to the quality of the content, I feel I can do far better and will be stepping up my video game!

First, I’m going to be breaking up my current YouTube account into 3 distinct channels outside of my personal videos; “Kver Create!”, “Kver Play!” and “Kver Workshop!”. I’m furiously trying to get everything ready, but here’s what everyone can expect:

Kver Create!

Will focus on work, and will be mostly livestreams. This is where I’ll be doing things like wallpapers, icons, other art, development, and even personal projects. It’s also where I’ll publish excerpts of the previously recorded livestreams when there’s interesting segments. In the future it might be neat to feature other artists and developers as well. Expect regular KDE content here.

Kver Play!

May or may not have a future, but if my first livestreams taught me anything it’s that I’m not yet comfortable with the mic, so what’s a better teacher than a more casual and fun environment while I rehabilitate my voicebox? This will probably have the most livestreams out-of-gate, but I imagine it will slow down in favour of other channels as time goes on.

Kver Workshop!

This is by far the channel I’m most excited for. It’s also going to be the last to see published videos, as I want to put the most branding, thought, and production effort into it before content start rolling out. Workshop! will cover a variety of topics, such as digital art, development, and even just using the various desktops in Linux.

For every topic there will be two types of videos: The first is short sweet to-the-point tutorials showing you how to use a tool or accomplish a goal in a program. That might include showing you the snapping tools in Inkscape, the animation docker in Krita, or the web inspector in your browser. The second type of videos will be “Advanced Workshops”, and I’m giddy over what I have planned! When a workshop is scheduled a series of tutorials will be produced in advance, the workshop will list those videos in the lead-up, then the workshop itself will put that knowledge into practice. Workshops will always be livestreamed so participants can ask questions, interact, and learn how to push their software to the limits. Once the format is fully ironed out I really want to bring in other experts, but that’s down the road.

An example of what sort of thing you might expect to learn in a workshop is how to draw semi-realistic hardware such as the laptop featured on the kde.org homepage – with leading tutorials covering things like the perspective tool and keeping vector art web-friendly. Another example of a workshop might be how to make KDE Plasma icons to standard, and down the road I’m even thinking of getting in touch with Gnome/Elementary/etc folks to see if they want workshops run to make assets in their standards.

What’s coming up?

I’m still working on making everything reasonably presentable, so the first videos will be rolling out a bit later towards the end of this upcoming week, but once it’s all up-and-running I’ll aim for an initial schedule of 4 livestreams/week, and once the Workshop! fiddlybits are sorted out we’ll trade in a livestream or two for more tutorial content. Here’s the schedule for next week:

  • Thursday January 20th at 12:00PM EST on the Create! channel: a two-to-four-hour livestream where I work on various icons in Inkscape and Python. I’ll be starting with application icons, and follow the chat if they want me to work on mimetypes and the Iconoclast pipeline. The main stream will be two hours, and I’ll do another two in an “aftershow” after a short break.
  • Thursday January 20th at 5:00PM EST on the Play! channel: is going to be a fun livestream where I game on Linux! While for me the goal is to be less awkward and more open on mic, I’m sure everybody tuning in will enjoy the fact that I – a total wuss – will be playing a scary game. I do not do well with scary games. Fine with movies. Very poorly with games. The name of the game is Outlast. I hear it is a pleasant walk in the asylum park.
  • Friday January 21st at 12:00PM EST on the Create! channel: will be livestreaming work on an in-development game built using Godot and entirely FLOSS applications. The livestream itself will be mostly work in Krita. This is very much a personal passion project, and for those interested I’ll be talking about the lore of the game and the overall intended design.
  • Friday January 21st at 5:00PM EST on the Play! channel: another scary game livestream. Probably a continuation of Outlast assuming it’s appropriately torturous fun, but I’ll take requests if people want me to mix it up.

I’m going to be re-evaluating the streams on a week-by-week basis. Mostly right now I’m just trying to get used to the mic while I work on overlays and such. There’s nothing slated for Workshop! yet, again, because I want everyone who wants to learn and participate to get a truly gold-standard experience. The kind of thing that you might pay a premium for – but for free. Part of this is planning and building out interactive overlays that will be specific to that channel, I want the interactive component to be nothing like anything else available today.

Once I finish up the basics for the channels, I’ll post the links in an update. Expect them in a few days!