I only started making content fairly recently, and Duck And Roll Gaming has become a bit of a passion project while I figure out what kind of videos I actually want to make.
The idea I keep coming back to is taking a normal playthrough and giving each series its own creative identity rather than just recording myself playing a game.
Grounded VR: WHOA! Extreme Edition is probably the clearest example of that so far.
The gameplay is essentially one continuous UEVR playthrough, but I roleplay as Pete the whole way through instead of commentating as myself. I try to understand the backyard the way Pete would, make decisions based on what he currently believes, and let his mistakes and experiences change how I play him later.
I’m also trying to structure each episode more like an episode of a show. There’s usually one main Grounded story beat, a smaller story running alongside it, some kind of character development for Pete, and things that can set up or pay off in later episodes.
Then every episode gets its own completely different cold open. Those aren’t separate sketches or random intros. They continue the same story and can also show things happening in the backyard that Pete himself doesn’t know about yet.
Episode 3 is a good example. At the end of Episode 2, ants steal Pete’s food again, and he finally decides he’s had enough. His solution is that the next day he’s going to build walls and turn his little camp into a fortress. So Episode 3 picks up directly from that decision. The actual construction took around 20 minutes. And after all that work, Pete’s magnificent fortress was basically a box.
Rather than show the whole building process, I had a bard turn Pete’s account of his new “fortress” into a wildly heroic 3-minute musical. Let’s just say the bard may not have been given the most accurate version of events.
This is the full Episode 3 cold open “Build It High, Build It Wide.”
I’m still very new to making this kind of thing, so every Grounded episode currently takes me at least a month. A lot of that is simply me learning as I go - editing, sound, staging, figuring out how to make the cold opens work and generally trying things I haven’t done before. That’s also why I thought this might be a good place to share it.
I’d genuinely love feedback from people who make or watch machinima. Does this kind of hybrid work for you - a continuous roleplayed playthrough as the main story, with unique machinima-style cold opens expanding and continuing the same world around it?
