Post by komehara in Get to know! Mado Cactus Fairy Vtuber comments

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A pretty advanced interactive portfolio!

OK, I stumbled on this page from my itch notifications, probably after following you from malViolence (not played though). I tried to run it without any context (the “[Learn more about my history with auditioning for Hololive here.]” had no hyperlink, I found later the link in the Development log but I think there was supposed to be a link in the sentence too).

So I was kinda confused, but since the presentation is lively and interactive with voice acting, I got caught it (only checked Illustrations so far). I’m not familiar with auditions but I did play a few game dev interactive portfolios (you know, the ones where you can actually play and move around to see the dev’s career on your own, sometimes complete with rhythm and beat ‘em up web game), so it was the closest thing I could connect to. But it’s the first time I see one that is voiced!

It’s actually catchier than my own proper Visual Novels - but the character is addressing the player directly so I suppose it’s not something I could pull in my own stories, considering their format. However, I learned a thing or two from animations (the character tilts their head when they say “good taste!”). Audio is also refined (filter on voice coming from behind the door).

The voice acting is very good, I was wondering if I would naturally voice my own character well because I’m actually playing myself and showing my own work. But looking at your post-mortem which shows you actually worked on song covers, etc. I suppose that’s part of the acting work really. Not sure if it’s worth learning proper acting just to be able to voice myself in my own programmer portfolio… That’s probably better to have a clean voice to play an animated character, but if I used live footage then I suppose my normal voice would be OK since it wouldn’t really differ from the usual Zoom interviews.

I have troubles playing web games on my laptop as they take 50-100% of my CPU so I would have liked playing a desktop version, but I understand why an audition/portfolio is better in web format.

Well, I suppose this page is for people meant to recruit you but it was interesting having links to your non-game works which are not displayed on itch.io. I also found your website: https://madocactus.portfolio.site/ (better for me to quickly get the links and save images in my personal notes). Feedback: the carousel doesn’t show left/right arrows, it may be easy to miss for people who are not familiar with the dot selector at the bottom, and they may think that there is only one work. I’m used to it so I pressed left/right arrows but it’s better to offer obvious mouse navigation too.

The VTuber world is a bit obscure to me but I do recognize a combination of skills that indie game devs usually look forward to (unless they prefer hiring other people, as I’m myself trying to do). I wonder how they could put your game dev skills to contribution. Promoting your own game with your avatar would bring more views? Making games for other members too?

Funnily enough, Hololive JP sent me an offer for “Unity engineer” once, but I wasn’t interested as I wasn’t into it (the few VTubers I listen to are part of other crews, and I really just care about their music - I tend to strictly separate channels to listen to music and those to watch Let’s Play, probably due to the habit of working while listening to music in the background vs actively watching a gameplay video to learn about the game). I haven’t checked Hololive EN, maybe I’d have more interest in them, especially if they have a more mixed cast and cool designs (like this one). But, I suppose in the end I just really like seeing characters inside games and movies rather than as avatars. So, I can’t guarantee I’ll be watching Mado on YouTube - except for the song covers.

Erm, it got a bit long, sorry. Plus, it’s not great putting too much personal opinion as comment just below someone’s portfolio. I can trim my comment to the essential feedback if you want.

Mado208 days ago

Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad you liked my interactive portfolio. I also fixed the issues with the description link on this page.

Thank you also for pointing out the issues with my website's carousel. Carbonmade (the portfolio builder I use) is a bit fiddly, but if it means making my work more accessible to others I'll gladly update this issue.

As for the VTuber pitch angle of things... existing Hololive EN members have made games (Machina X Flayon and Amelia Watson come to mind), but I wanted to position myself as a gamedev-centric VTuber. So, creating videos on making games, hosting official Hololive game jams, and promoting HoloIndies on behalf of the company.

I think my future YouTube career will be a combination of posting creative work I've made (new game trailers, animations, animatic) and potentially video essays? I'm not abandoning the idea of using my avatar for it - but I'd struggle to call myself a VTuber because I don't see myself aligning with the VTuber career path anymore. I guess my avatar would be more like... a rantsona with extra steps LOL

komehara208 days ago(+1)

I see. I searched yesterday and found a few fan games featuring Hololive characters, but I don’t think they were made by the members themselves. More like a “we give you right to sell games with these characters, make something cool” (I would love having an open license to work on, similarly to Touhou, but it turns out that my main issue is actually drawing sprites, so having a character design, and Touhou for instance requires to create original sprites, so I’m not sure how much it would help me).

I also want to make more videos on game development and combining it with gameplay videos that are fun to watch. Like: there is this bug/exploit in this game, how can I reproduce it? Fix it? Is it a fundamental game design issue? But I don’t spend enough time on video editing. Got a lot of recording from Sonic Frontiers I haven’t been using, and a bunch of exploits I remember from Tales of Symphonia I’d like to try again in the remake to see if they still work…

Anyway, I think it’s good as an indie to find your own path and skill combination. Taking another branch of entertainment, idols learn acting, voice acting, singing, dancing, but no producer would have the idea to have them learn… illustration, or movie editing (useful for promotional videos!). But I’ve seen many artists move from interpretation to creation, try side activities, and it contributed to their creative power as a whole. At the same time, I get that it’s hard to learn too many things, in depth, hence the teams. For specialized individuals, an organization that can connect people from different fields together is ideal! Maybe something like Game Creators Camp in Japan.

Mado207 days ago

Yeah - most Holoindies are made by prior devs. On the talent front, though - I did see Machina X Flayon work on his own RPGMaker backstory game, though- and I know Houshou Marine had similar experience with a highschool project she had.

I think one YouTuber who does game development/behind the scenes bugs videos that I really like is Skawo. He usually does playthroughs of Nintendo games, but when he does a behind-the-scenes deep dive, his videos are well-presented and well-edited. Might be worth looking through his stuff - or anyone else who's worked with The Cutting Room Floor!

Yeah, I'd love an organization that would connect people from different fields... The US has some, but it's not quite on the level of people making doujin circles in Japan LOL.

komehara198 days ago(+1)

Oh, OK, I don’t see a video on the Machina X Flayon page so I can’t comment much.

Your video with Houshou Marine (surprised by her voice btw, considering her pirate look) actually reminded me of some game I made in high-school on a Casio calculator. For some reason I didn’t use RPG Maker for that long, at the time (and nowadays it wouldn’t fill my professional needs, e.g. balancing all stats with a spreadsheet, coding the way I want, debugging… and too many plugins needed to make it look the way I want) but I had fun making my own systems.

That became my first non-trivial digital (if not video) game, a text adventure with a few procedural 4-color pixel art CG (yeah!) and extremely boring turn-based battle (I didn’t know the words “game design”). There was even a shop+equipment system so you could almost call it an RPG.

If it was shown publicly, it would look lame, but at least the script was written as a parody of RPG with a lot of pop culture references, so I suppose it would look like it’s done on purpose. In fact, I considered reviving it as a proper comedy indie game, but I’d need to revive that old calculator, maybe some cable to dump the data to my PC (or restart from scratch, it wasn’t really that great), revamp the battle system and probably make the 4th wall breaking even more obvious. Hm, looks like I got carried away.

Anyway, that Zelda save corruption video was interesting! Could be a funny exercise for students “find an edge case causing a bug in this piece of code taken from an actual game”. I also liked other Zelda hack videos like the one one blue dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1l6Xj4PLEk

My videos would be different in that I don’t have access to game code / disassembly (they could be more modern games that have not been studied so much), so instead of analyzing things I can see, I would be trying hard to reproduce the bug by making hypotheses and experimenting. I suppose it could be fun, if shown the right way (and there comes the question of video editing!)