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The Long Overdue Channel Rework Project

The tl;dr version of this announcement is "I'm reworking the channel to make it look more professional," but there's more to it for those who are interested:

As some of you may have already noticed, over the past few months there has been some changes made to the White Rhino PSO brand both on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet. Because I'm a nerd, I've been referring to these changes as "The Channel Rework Project," and there are two main stages.

In early August of this year, I contacted a graphic artist named John Poh for work on a project that would make the YouTube channel look more professional, and hopefully generate more traffic to its content. Over the following month, we worked together to create a channel banner, a new icon, and a template that could easily be used for making video thumbnails. The core concept for the new graphics was to give them a similar style to the UI from Phantasy Star Online for the SEGA Dreamcast.

Despite being the least important of the three images, the channel banner came out great. The icon and channel name have the same visual style as Phantasy Star Online's in-game HUD. I also think that the banner will make viewers take the channel more seriously on a subconscious level - that channels with a banner are somehow "a step above" those that don't have one.

The thumbnail template was the most important aspect of the whole project. On the Let's Play subreddit, users would say "Imagine your thumbnail among the results of a search on YouTube. Would you click on your video?" Because my old thumbnails were just a part number added to the title card Steam uses for each game, I would definitely answer "No." The new design still lets viewers know what game is being played, and the channel icon is easily recognizable, but now there is a lot of space to put an interesting thumbnail that will hopefully get people to watch.

Making a new icon was a little more awkward. My first thoughts had been to simply recreate the old icon in the same visual style as the thumbnail and banner.. but then I realized that my old icon was taken directly from Phantasy Star Online, and is likely still subject to copyright. After some back-and-forth with John, we came up with a new design, unique to both the channel and me as a user, while retaining the same visual style.

The second half of the Channel Rework Project involves going through and updating all of my previously posted content.

While the videos themselves will remain the same - with a few rare exceptions - the following aspects are going to be reworked:

• The title of each video.
  
• Each video's flavor text.
  
• Series information (game description, playlist links, other creator links).
  
• Playlist descriptions.
  
• and each video's thumbnails, using the new template design.

Other aspects of this stage involve posting links on my new Twitter account with a short blurb about each video, and re-attaching each video to Steam so that their new titles, description box text, and thumbnails get updated. I might also take some time to finally write reviews for each game I've played for the channel, with the eventual goal of becoming a Steam curator based around that content.

While it should be obvious that I'm not done creating let's play videos for my YouTube channel, I don't plan on posting anything new until after I go through and update all of my old content.

I'm honestly not sure how long this will take; previous estimates for when I would be done have been October 2020 (totally unreasonable), and then January 2021 (highly doubtful). Right now I'm shooting for March 2021, but even that might be wishful thinking.