What I Learned Developing my First Video Course

I have been writing books and magazine articles since college. But. my first serious article was published in Computer Language Magazine in September 1991 called "Dither It!" (I have a copy somewhere, but can't find it).

When I went to the store and saw the magazine on the shelf, I picked up a copy, quickly paged through it and saw my article, I was so excited! I thought, I am finally published!

Now, remember, as a child of the 70's and 80's this is how we did things -- We read books and magazines to learn, maybe accessed BBSs' on the "InterNet" at 300/1200 baud and scrolled through 1000's of messages on these online boards and mailing lists. So, if you wanted to contribute to the conversation, you had to get published in books and articles if you wanted any chance of anyone else reading what you had to say. Especially, if you wanted readers from other countries to ever have a chance of accessing your materials. Well, I was hooked at this point.

I had been developing games for years and selling them through various "Shareware" vendors, and I really wanted everyone else to experience how cool writing games on the PC could be, so I started writing books about the subject in a conversational manner with very practical code and examples and VERY visual style. My first big book was "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus" in 1993.

This was the first book of its kind, so more or less created a new niche in computer books -- "Game Development Books". At this point, I wrote book after book, bigger, better, more complex. Some titles where for beginners, while others like "Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus" were basically giant 1600 page math books!

Seems crazy now, since you can put up a post on Facebook, or other social media platform and in seconds, the entire planet has access, but just a short years ago -- if you wanted to be published, you had to go through the process. That meant a publisher, a deal, contract, editors, many of them, peer review, drafts of your work, it's a LOT of process and the result is (usually), a high quality piece of information written by someone that has had a team of people behind them!

I switched back and forth between writing games and publishing them via my company Xtreme Games LLC and writing books about the subject -- This was the Golden Era of the both Game Development books and game development technology. The 1990's especially were magic since the computers were just fast enough where clever programmers could use short cuts like BSP Trees (Binary Space Partitioning), Ray Casting (basically reverse Ray-Tracing) and other tricks to make games that blew people's minds such as Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake.

I couldn't write the books fast enough to keep up with the sales....

But, like anything, everything comes to an end. By the early 2000's my own books as well as the Game Development Series I created with Premier Press had started saturating the market. Everyone was writing game development books at this point. The potential market was growing for both game developers and gamers, but still everyone was making less money individually due to the explosion of information.

Then came the REAL "internet" with a vengeance. The toy browser (Mosiac), the funny little websites, all changed into serious pieces of technology. Although, it was only 5 years from 1995 when the first browser came out, we had already gone through a generation of technology. Therefore, online forums, blogs, and similar "social" platforms threw their hats into the conversation. Soon, you could find online articles about game development, even courses, classes and schools (I was one of the early advisors and instructors at GameInstitute.com which is still around). All this pressure from online digital access pressured publishers as well. The multi billion dollar publishing magnets all were trying to play catch up, as well as stay relevant when information was coming online that was more or less free. You could find just about anything with a google search (or hotbot and yahoo back then).

All this pressure slowly transformed profit margins from printed books into a scarcity -- everything was turning into a "volume" business. Worst yet, one could self publish information online, sure it's not edited, peer reviewed, etc. but you could get it online faster. Therefore, printed publishers had a second problem and that's -- books take too long to write, edit, print, and distribute and at the same time they are competing with low grade information on the net that customers don't really know the difference, and will usually select "free" over "not free". Tech book advances went from $10-15K to $1-5K.

To make a long story short, the days of being an author in the conventional sense have changed forever -- this is progress I guess.

Alas, I stopped writing books in 2006 or so and focused on my hardware company, manufacturing products, and I got the need to publish and write out of my system by writing the manuals for my products and making them into small 250-350 page user guides that one might find with a new computer from the 80's. Sure, every now and then I might get talked into doing a book or collaborating on something, for example for Parallax, I co-authored and managed this book:

But, no matter what, I knew, I would never be able to write a book again to make a living from, at least in the traditional sense. This really sucks for professional authors. Sure, some have weathered the storm and keep writing about the latest, hot thing, shorter titles, get them done faster. Nonetheless, there is no arguing internet has made "information" less valuable since with enough hunting you can find just about anything.

So, what to do? Well, I was busy building hardware, and watched the years go buy. As networks got faster, smart phones became prevalent, and video streaming was actually viable, I watched cautiously while people tried to use it as an authoring platform. There are your youtube stars, companies that build online courses, but again, as an individual, there's an enormous amount of noise, competition, and luck to be able to do well online with pure digital information.

Everyone, rushed out to create youtube channels, online streaming websites, and more after the "video" as an option became validated. This was good and bad. Good because it enabled people that would never be able to publish information via video the freedom to do so, and bad because it ENABLED people that would never be able to publish information via video the freedom to do so! And a lot of bad information, low grade, you name it started to pour out of the digital abyss at an exponential rate.

Still -- I waited. Like anything in life, I like to go all out and do a good job, so if I was going to try a video course, I wanted to do something useful (I picked electronics), and I wanted it to be big, complete, and really be something I was proud of.

Therefore, I watched, these online course delivery platforms mature, I tried them all -- I was one of the first to take classes at MITs OpencourseWare platform for example, and I thought, "this is going to work". I just need a big enough platform that can handle the size of course I want to do, is streamlined for students and doesn't completely screw the instructor.

With that in mind, about 3 years ago, I started watching Udemy very seriously, taking classes there -- seeing what others were doing. Immediately, I could see that a lot of the pure programming and coding courses could be made very well, very slick production since you need nothing more than a screen cast. But, other courses that were hands on, electronics for example, were tough -- I saw bad lighting, horrible audio, and many courses that clearly were done by competent instructors, but this platform was just not working for hands on material unless you have a whole production crew supporting you like the Ben Heck show!

Nevertheless, I mapped out a beginner electronics course, came up with a flashy name (I have a good amount of salesmanship in my DNA), and started on "Crash Course Electronics and PCB Design".

The course was basically designed around the first chapters of my book, "The Black Art of Video Game Console Design", the electronics stuff, not the gaming.

I got my outline together, then started trying to imagine how I would record myself talking, working on the blackboard, building things on the bench. I set up camera equipment, tried lighting, mics, different pipelines and so forth. No matter what, I hated watching myself - I thought "god I look fat!" :)

But, I pressed on, and the idea was to do each lecture organically. I have taught this stuff so many times, I can lecture on it without notes, and just do it -- still, it's not easy.

You feel like you can't stop and think and you have to keep talking. The first few videos are still a little rough. I forgot, I can just sit and think and then EDIT that out later. But, at first it's not habit and you speed talk a bit.

Then there are all the editing tools. Since I am a game developer, I have no problem using media tools, but TIME is an issue and cost. I don't want to waste time. I am not making a movie, and each lecture does NOT need to be perfect. So, Adobe Premier, Sony Vegas, and Camtasia where my tools of choice. Editing up to 4 cameras isn't easy for 30-60 mins lectures. Basically, each lecture is simple, no effects, the goal is to cut garbage, have clean transitions from camera to camera -- But, at all costs have the BEST audio.

This is so important. The audio. Make no mistake, if you are not clear or have bad audio, you are dead. I use a headset and 3 other mics each lecture, and take the audio that is the cleanest.

Then 18 months later it was all done! I had about 130+ lectures, 400 hours of video or so, that I had to edit all down. Day by day, I had to watch myself over and over, every frame, and edit the cameras, audio, etc. to get the lectures making sense. This would be hard enough for a single 2 minute Kickstarter video, but to shoot and edit 130+ videos myself, and 400+ hours or raw HD/HDR video was a lot of work. I bit off more than I could chew -- but, being the kind of guy I am, I just gritted my teeth and did it, like a book, or game, any other large project. You stop whining about it, and just work each day, it WILL get done.

Finally, I was done! Then I needed the promo video -- "I thought, OMG now I have to get in front of the camera again, no sleep for months, I went from working out 7 days a week to once, I look like death warmed over". And again, I watched promo video after promo video, some are HORRIFIC -- while others looked amazing. They had the camera floating, panning, excellent lighting, the instructors had makeup on, they shot multiple angles and cut from one to the other, and so forth. I thought, how am I going to do this by myself with my 3 year old toddler running around, in between running my company and 100 emergencies I have each day?

As usual, I came up with a plan, I have a cool room where I keep games, books, toys, and products I have made over the years, and I watch movies there -- I thought, that can be a good background -- Better than sitting in my living room, or shooting the video at some random company lobby or school.

Hence, I put my Canon DSLR camera on a tripod, set up lights I use to take product pictures, and started trying some ideas out -- I HATED all of it. I don't mind getting up in front of people, I do public speaking all the time, but I do NOT like being on camera, never have, and I HATE video -- That said, I tried different colored shirts, lighting, the whole deal - things I remembered when shooting pictures and video over the years for games.

In the end, I finally was marginally happy with my promo video, it's no trailer for Star Wars, but on Udemy compared to a lot of the other Electronics and Engineering promos, it's not bad -- And this is important, I was making a product --I don't want to spend too much time on things like promo videos, but you MUST since this is how people "see" your product. On the other hand, I just have to be a little better than the competition.

This philosophy I use in a lot of things. First thing is get the product done, you can always make it better later. If you are a perfectionist, you will never SHIP anything in life. You have to at some point, just give into your urge to do it better and give up the battle to win the war.

So, that's the little story of how I went from writing books to making my first video course.

Now, I am in the marketing phase (if you're reading this in summer of 2018), and this is another tiring step. I have 100's of ideas and tasks that I do for all my books, games, hardware, each time I release something. Of course, these days everything is more "social media" based which I do NOT like. I prefer calling magazines and trying to get some copy in the "New Product" section next month, things like that. But, we all have to FB, Tweet, IG it, Posh it, Pin it, and the rest -- I need a shower after all that...

What's next? Well, I will see how this does, mostly, what I like to see is students that had no clue about something, or thought it was impossible for them, to take this class and then actually learn electronics and PCB design and MAKE something.

In life, very few people ever get the pleasure of creating a work of art, technology, or "thing" themselves, selling it, or otherwise getting it into the hands of other people and then watch someone else learn or smile because of it. It's a sublime moment being able to help someone else reach their goals in life or their career, or just make them laugh and what it's all about...

Sure, we all have to pay bills, and I make things to make money. But, my true passion and what drives me to kill myself building things for others is the chance to make someone else happy and give them the opportunity to do the same, I guess that's why I like teaching.