The Planning of Yogsimulated

 

Exactly two months ago, I posted a fan-created story to Wattpad that put focus onto a well-known entertainment brand. Yogsimulated told the tale of ten members of the Yogscast getting to experience a new type of virtual reality and be the ones to make it public through the use of a video. Each of the four points of view explored the same events but with different experiences being felt.

And now, with this post, I’m going to give a bit of a behind the scenes look at what sort of ideas I had planned for, and why the things that went into it happened. If you haven’t read it yet and want to do so before reading this look back at its creation, you can do so by following this link. Now, let’s start at the beginning.

The time was around this point last year. The Jingle Jam of 2018 had finished, I’d been watching some of the regular streams over the month, and wanted to celebrate my appreciation of the Yogscast in the way I knew best. But what could I use as a story? Did I want to go wild with it or play it safe?

I eventually opted for the latter, but used a bit of creative licence when crafting the characters. All of that came in the last few months before release, however, since for most of the year it was just small bits of ideas that never really got put down in writing. The only thing I had really settled on was – as with all my fan-created works – an alternate reality that allowed me to be a bit more creative with the world.

So to start with I had a list of various members who could be used in whatever story happened to uncover. That list was always changing and evolving, and at one point I had considered adding original characters into the ‘cast – though I felt doing so wasn’t in the spirit of what I wanted this to be about. Then there were the events I wanted to happen. I had considered taking the ‘cast on an adventure of some sort, so for the first few months the label of Yogventures was applied to the folder of ideas.

Such adventures were to have referenced a few things from the then recent videos I had watched, though such ideas had never been put into data form. I just knew I wanted an adventure to happen. But then I started to think on something I like to say, and decided to theme the adventure around that. “Adventure can be found in your hometown” was something of a phrase I’d say near the summer, as I would sometimes just head out with end goal in mind. So with the Yogscast being based in Bristol, the adventure of Bristol started forming, with wacky antics being had as they travelled around.

That idea lasted a few weeks before I then decided on a new angle. Now in the second half of the year, the Jingle Jam would soon be returning for another December of festive-themed charity streams. I wanted something that would tie in – however loosely – with that event. So, what with the alternate reality in mind, I uprooted something from Elemental Heroes for use here. That being the virtual reality that was pretty much an alternate reality. A video game environment where you controlled every action you made.

The idea was that they had been invited by the inventor of the technology to be the ones to make it public. As for what they were doing within the virtual Bristol, I at first flavoured it as a Gmod-like experience, with game modes similar to those the Yogscast have played on the main channel. Rather than transferring them completely over, I started to develop similar modes to fill in for them. Only infiltration – the TTT-like mode – ever had ideas written down for it.

Infiltration would have been an objective mode, where the team have a goal that needs to be completed. However, there are infiltrators who aim to stop that goal being completed by killing the other members of the team. For every five players, one would be an infiltrator. Everyone would have a role which determined which weapons they had access to, independent of whether they were an infiltrator. The game would have been played with full communication off, which would have made for a more plot-focused section of the story rather than being character interaction based.

Then I added some racing to the ideas of games that would be played in the virtual reality, and since my heart lies with racing, that’s what the entire story became based around. Not only did it allow for character interaction to be at the fore of the story, it allowed for an expression of just how much could be got away with in this virtual reality. You’re not going to be able to zoom around the city streets without repercussions in reality, after all, and that’s something I made sure to highlight within the story, along with a few extra bits about the morality of actions even in a virtual world.

The list of characters had been finalised and I got to writing. The first pass at it needed some strengthening in certain areas. The introduction felt weak, and there was little in the way of true interaction. There also needed to be some world building and explanation of the systems at play within this virtual world. The second pass made sure to correct that weakness, adding in the world building elements, while still keeping it all told from Lewis’ point of view.

Now, truth be told, it could have ended there, ready to be uploaded to Shorts of the Rula in November. But if this was a celebration, I wanted it done right. There were four groups in the introduction, and so another three points of view were written. Doing so allowed me to include the three journeys in the first half that would never have been told, along with some more world building opportunities. I could also put some focus to areas that wouldn’t have seen much under just the one point of view. Working on those other three POVs brought to light a few corrections and additions I made to the overall story.

Looking on what was created, I felt it managed to convey the usual banter and interaction that videos of the Yogscast have, but aside from the world building of the virtual reality technology, doesn’t stand as a massively strong story. It was something made by a fan to celebrate their appreciation of a brand. In this case, the Yogscast. And it does do that, but I’m left wondering what I could have achieved had I kept the larger ambition for the project I’d had at the start. Video content is what we love the Yogscast for, but – while certainly a unique take – doesn’t mean a story written about them has to follow that core foundation.

That game mode of Infiltration I have kept as an idea for another time. It won’t see anything major done with it, but it serves its use as a world building tool – whether for a continuation of this story (since I could theoretically make a second story based on the livestream during Jingle Jam I reference in the first) or for another of my worlds as a mode within a standard game.

What I do want to try is a story that takes those original ideas of an adventure and make something of them. If I feel the opportunity is there to make another fan-created story using the brand of the Yogscast, I will try to incorporate those ideas into such a story. I’d want such a story to have something unique to it, though, so will only use such ideas in such a way if it makes sense for what I want to achieve.

While what I said above does make it seem like I am disappointed in how this came out, I am anything but. As said, it managed to convey the banter and interaction videos of the Yogscast have, and that was what I set out to achieve once I had a goal in mind. I’ll leave it up to you to see if I managed to succeed at that, but I feel it has.

Farming Fever Still Holds With No Signs of Faltering

Back at the beginning of October, I made a post talking about my latest hook in gaming. That hook came from revisiting the Feed a Cow For Christmas Jingle Jam 2018 stream of the Yogscast, and within the post I gave a brief history of my exposure to Yogscast content which led into how I first got that hook into Farming Simulator.

At the end, I said I had my eye on what would become of Farming Simulator 2020 on Switch. Depending on if I felt that would give me a great experience, I’d either buy it or give it a miss and wait for 2021 – which would be the new entry rather than a mobile port of the previous year’s game.

Well, things didn’t progress that slowly. From 2017 on the Xbox One, it took no time at all before I jumped onto the Switch edition of 2017, which is pretty much the same game with just a few tweaks to get it running on less powerful hardware. I was already having doubts about 2020 on Switch being the full content packed offering, and to see that there was such a thing on Switch had me wanting it. In a portable form, I’d get more play out of it.

And that indeed happened. In near enough two months, it has seen more than one hundred hours of play. To make things feel unique between the two versions (I’ve still been putting a few hours on the Xbox One version since buying the Switch version), I played on the other map included within the game, with separate goals in each. I was still in love with the gameplay loop, the relaxed nature of everything, and even exploring around the maps.

2017 was great fun, but I’d already said how it wasn’t as refined as 2019 looked within that previous post. From that Feed a Cow For Christmas stream, I’d seen a good amount of the maps within 2019 and wanted to explore them for myself. So, to try to push myself back to playing games on a PC (other than GTA V), I bought Farming Simulator 2019 on Steam.

I’ve recently hit and gone beyond ten hours of play on it, and it does feel a much better experience over 2017 in some areas. The mission system, where you’d help other farmers, feels more involved now. Whereas 2017 would have you work from the field the mission was tied to and hold you there until the job was done or the timer ran out, with 2019 you are no longer locked to the field of the mission’s origin. Missions can be accepted anywhere on the map through the menu, and you are no longer restricted to the set vehicles of choice, with the ability to use any you already own.

The freedom that offers is a lot better, and the same goes for the start of the game. With 2017, you started with a full farm already – complete with buildings, machines, fields, and a silo to store crops within. 2019 gives you none of that, instead giving a large sum of money for you to do what you want with. Instead of buying fields, you are now buying pieces of land, so you can choose where you want to base yourself. While the largest pieces of land are not going to be available to you even with such a large amount of starting cash, there’s a good amount of areas you can buy with the freedom to go for however many you want.

But you still need to buy all that equipment to run your farm, so there needs to be a balance of land ownership and vehicle purchasing (or leasing if you want to go straight for the big stuff). But it’s those vehicles that are perhaps the largest downfall of the game. Things were floaty and very easy to lose control of in 2017, sure, but in 2019 the problem seems a bit worse. Harvesters – great massive heavy beasts – shouldn’t be losing grip so easily. It’s not a problem when working on a field, but when travelling between them and on the roads, they do seem to like acting the same as the lightest of tractors when turning.

There’s also a few things missing that 2017 had, most notably placeable solar collectors and greenhouses, though a mod can sort that easy enough. Instead, animal pens have now been made placeable, which is much better than having a set point where you have to look after them. It’s a feature that really pushes that freedom to have things where you want them, and I’m currently saving up the in-game cash to make use of it.

Two months with the series has been enough to cement it as one of my favourites. There will come a time that I burn out, as always happens with games, but I’m confident that it won’t be happening any time soon with this series. No matter which version I’m playing, I can lose myself in it and pass hours away. It can always grab me, and unlike a few other similar games, still continues to do so.

Once again, I must give a shout to the Yogscast, as while I knew of the series, it was seeing the Yogs play it on that stream that pushed me to giving it a try. And my wish of seeing them return to it for this year’s Jingle Jam has happened, with the first week of the schedule having been released. This year’s Jingle Jam is one I am sure will be brilliant, and it gets started on the first of December, with Feed a Cow For Christmas being on the second.

The Yogscast Jingle Jam Gave Me Farming Fever

Despite having Game Pass for more than a year, there’s very little I’ve actually played from it. Sea of Thieves has been the main contributor for play time from it, with Zoo Tycoon, Gears 4, and State of Decay 2 seeing varying levels of usage from it. The latest game to be played from the service is Farming Simulator 2017. But that latest could have been ten months earlier when I’d found my latest hook in gaming. Let me explain that.

In 2015 I had bought GTA V on PC, with a push from my sister and a friend, and jumped straight into the online, where I spent a lot of time creating races as well as driving across routes of many others. To go with this, I had taken an interest in looking on Youtube for other races I could play. One of those places I stumbled upon was Smosh Games with their Grand Theft Smosh series. The other was the Yogscast main channel, which my sister had sent a video from, of the Biking on Water Ragequit Races video.

You might be wondering what this has to do with being encouraged to get into Farming Simulator 2017, but the story continues with a newfound fascination with the content of the Yogscast, or at least the GTA videos. Soon after I added Hat Films to those channels from the Yogscast network I watched, and through Hat Films I started to move on from just the GTA content. Not long after that, I started doing the same on the main channel, as well as venturing through the other channels to see what they offered.

Come to near the end of 2018, where as well as being a near daily watcher of both the main channel and Hat Films, I’d been looking at the videos ThatMadCat put out relating to the livestreams the Yogscast network hosted on Twitch. That entire side of things I had avoided, as the only livestreams I had watched were those relating to events – such as E3, Star Wars Celebration, and even Summer of Sonic 2013. I was willing to commit for an event, but not really for anything else. Then came the Jingle Jam.

ThatMadCat had put out a video of why you should watch Jingle Jam 2018, using content from all the previous years the Yogscast Christmas Livestreams had taken place. It was this that I felt would be a good entry point for general livestreams. On the first of December I watched entire first day in full, and was enjoying myself. The second day I only watched the opening stream, but the third day was another full day. I loved seeing the Yogs out and about looking around the Christmas markets of Bristol, but I loved watching them feed a cow for Christmas.

The final livestream of day three had Lewis, Duncan, and Sjin play Farming Simulator 2019, working the fields from nothing in order to buy and feed some cows within the game. As I watched, I liked what I was seeing. The freedom to do whatever you wanted in a rural farming community. As I continued to watch, I was looking the series up. I saw that there was one game on Game Pass. Farming Simulator 2017. I could have downloaded and started playing the next day, but I was on the fence about it. I’d enjoyed watching the stream, but would I also enjoy the game if I was playing?

Despite it being available through Game Pass throughout the entire month, I still didn’t take the plunge in downloading it, and soon after the start of the new year, I forgot about the urge to play it. Until recently.

It’s now getting to the point where it will be one year since I first started watching the livestreams. While I haven’t been uber dedicated to watching every single one, I have made time to watch a few favourites live. And since it is nearing one year since I first started watching the livestreams, I wanted to rewatch those that first introduced me to them. Which is how I was reliving that opening day of Jingle Jam 2018 on the ending Sunday of September, the day two and three opening streams on the Monday, as well as the Bristol Christmas markets stream.

Then it came to Wednesday, and rewatching Feed a Cow For Christmas. All the memories from all those days came back to me as I watched – including the want to be playing a Farming Simulator game. So on the same day, I finally checked Game Pass to see if the 2017 game was still there, and in just the three days since I started playing have racked up over ten hours within the game.

The hook of the game, like most business simulation games, is to make money and stay away from bankruptcy. What I feel makes Farming Simulator different from most business simulations is the lack of urgency required to manage things. With other examples, money is used and earned quickly, with the sense that if you don’t develop new things within your field and attract new customers, there won’t be any advancement to the amount of money you can make.

With Farming Simulator, you can take things at a slow pace, relax as you plough a field or sow some crop, just enjoying the sounds and sights of nature. You can tend your own farm, or hire some helpers to tackle the jobs in case you feel you’ll make a mess of things. There’s still monetary value to be aware of – earning money is still a thing – but you never feel in danger of losing everything because of one bad decision, or spending months upon in-game months trying to recoup lost money from that bad decision.

While you set your own helpers to work, you can also help the other farmers around with their fields, learning and earning, and working on a bond that will reduce the cost of their fields should you wish to expand. But even these can be done at your own pace – whether you travel from farm to farm tackling every mission you can find, or just taking one mission at a time every once in a while. You don’t even need to be entirely accurate or completely hit every spot to pass the mission, so these make a good place to start if you want to improve your own skills at operating the machinery.

2017 doesn’t feel as refined as how 2019 looked, but it’s still a good game that you can lose yourself to. I’ve already started looking at how the series has progressed, and to those games coming in the future. I have my eye on what becomes of the Switch version of Farming Simulator 2020, but I don’t think it will be as fully featured if it’s based on the mobile versions. It might just be that I go straight to 2021, but no matter which I go for next, I will always remember how I was first introduced to this series.

The Yogscast have been a part of my journey for four years, giving me plenty of laughs and a whole heap of entertainment. Last year, they introduced me to gaming personality livestreams, and this year I am ready to once again join the Jingle Jam for an adventure of Christmas spirit and holiday cheer. And hopefully another round of both Christmas markets and feeding a cow for Christmas.