What does it take to get a top player to record their games?

[fizzix]

I want to record more videos. Sadly my laptop isn't really up to snuff for streaming. Otherwise I'd like to do that and just copy the videos to youtube.

Anyway, I might try to record more videos this fall, but it's possible that like every other hobby right now, it might also get pushed off until after January when I get my life back.

Can you term-cast from windows? I would be willing to try that also.

Derakon: I had to shrink my visible space down a bit for online playing leaving only the essentials up (monster list, item list). You can leave other stuff up outside of the recording area if you want, and remember to bring up the appropriate window if you want to talk about it. And yeah, your voice does tire, especially if you're not used to speaking. I used to do a lot of public speaking type activities.

[quarague]

I think a lot of the benefit of recorded games could be gotten with an automatic record and a replay turn by turn feature that also shows the key strokes. No idea how hard that is to code but being able to post a game (or part of one) on the forums and then have people look through it and discuss it has great educational value (angband playing education that is).
Then the stronger player doesn't need to comment his own game but can rather answer specific questions. Additionally a beginning player could post a game asking 'what did I do wrong, why did I die?'

[bio_hazard]

Brogue save files have the step-through playback as part of the save file. Granted Brogue is a much shorter game than Angband.

Crawl allows 3rd party commentary, but of course that's on the online server.

I can't imagine anyone going back through a game in post-production to comment on everything- that seems like a pretty onerous task.

I wonder if a good solution would be to NOT worry about doing the whole game. If someone is motivated to do a thorough job of the first 20-30 levels and spend time talking about the early game, that would be great. If someone is into the mid-game diving, the equipment swapping game, what vaults to crack, etc, that would also be useful. Same with end-game- your'e at DL90, just need some more slay evil bolts, clean up some nasty uniques, then take on 99 and 100... Or do the whole game but rather than commenting on everything, do the early game and any particularly interesting levels or tactics you want to share, and edit out the other stuff.

[Derakon]

I've given a little thought to trying to do a screenshot-based Let's Play of the game, too. Some coding work ought to allow me to play at my normal "resolution" while still having screenshots that don't blow out peoples' browser windows. Unfortunately, like all other projects the biggest obstacle is me having/taking the time to actually do it...

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by DaviddesJ

I'm not a "top player" (I'm not much into competition), but I also enjoy playing relatively slowly, way too slowly for someone else to watch on a video.

If you wanted more replays, the best way to do that would be to convince the developers to build game-logging software into the game itself. With modern technology, it would be easy to record every keystroke and event that happens in a game, and then replay the game at any pace you want, being able to see everything that's happening at any time. But someone would have to want to do that work.

Someone actually did this - Pete Mack IIRC. It just didn't get incorporated into the master repo. (Pete himself said it was a non-trivial task to do so.)

This is exactly the kind of thing that made me want to work on Pyrel. In Pyrel I'd want to add that functionality if it wasn't already there. In Angband ... not so much.