OK, so I have been very busy with all kinds of things, which is great, and what is even better is 1.17 M:EE finally dropped. Which means I was able to release the 3rd video in the tutorial series.
One thing I have really enjoyed is watching the analytics of these new style tutorial videos and seeing whether all the effort, work, scoping, recording, scripting and editing is paying off for my viewers. I am glad to say it looks to be, with a very small sample, and a relatively short period of time.
Normally, and this is the reason I was exploring this as part of my masters degree, the viewer retention on my tutorial videos hovers around 10%, which means viewers, on average watch one tenth of the video I publish. What I am seeing with the current 2 videos is viewer retention over 30% and 40%. Which is still not what I would love, but it is proportionally longer even if the actual view time is less. Which is an interesting thing to think about, are viewers watching more, or less? They are watching more of a shorter video, but what is the impact on the actual time they are watching? Viewer feedback has been fairly positive, with people saying that they are able to follow along for the most part.
I am still 'iterating' on my process, and while I have not got anywhere near having video 4 ready to publish, for video 5 I am doing a bit of light video editing while I write the script, which I am hoping will make the final editing process a fair sight easier, but we will have to wait and see. I am really enjoying the whole process still, which is positive, but time is also getting harder to find, but I really want to get the whole series of 15 odd videos done before I run out of steam.
Another project I have been working on is the update to classroom management pack to make it better and have more functionality. It is just about ready for release, I just need to tweak one letterbox texture and then record my 'old style' video introducing it, and how to get it working. I have decided to push it out as it stands, even though I have more that I want to do to it, I found a few interesting bugs while trying to polish it for release. I also found that you can no longer 'hide' functions from users by putting an error in them within EE. As doing so prevents the game from calling the function at all, which is definitely new behaviour.
A group of us on the discord group started discussing the new features of structure blocks that come along with 1.17, and we collectively figured out a way of possibly transferring builds between worlds 'easily' using these new features. It is going to require a development behaviour pack in your EE install, and that pack being attached to each world you want the structures loaded in, but if we use development folder, users will be easily able to add their own builds do it. I need to explore how this might work on things like iPads which don't necessarily have easy access to the game folders. Also, I don't have a Chromebook to test yet so if you have one and want to help me out, let me know.
I am in the process of thinking about the 'cool' builds that might be useful to have across multiple words to put in this pack and sharing it, and the process to make life easier for those teachers who want to start/continue creating their own content. On that, if you have a build of your own that you think would be beneficial to have in a pack like this, and you are happy to make it available for others (with attribution of course) let me know and we can sort something out.
That's it for now, thanks for reading, as always feel free to leave a comment below, hit me up on twitter or join the mentor discord https://discord.gg/7fSQBdx
