October 2024 Sponsor Newsletter
October 2024 Sponsor Newsletter
Important anniversaries, upcoming case studies, newsletter topics, and more!
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Hello all and welcome to the latest edition of the Sponsor Newsletter here at
. here to fill you in on everything that’s happening across every facet of my plucky little media empire here.
But first, a small niggle in the schedule, given you may have noticed there wasn’t a sponsor newsletter in September. Well, that’s on me. We had sponsorship commitments with my collaboration with Transitional Forms and their game Little Learning Machines. That meant ensuring we had a bunch of newsletter issues for them to sponsor! So the schedule got re-worked a little given the agreement with Transitional Forms was made before I changed my newsletter publication cadence. Going forward, that won’t happen again. But it did mean that the sponsor newsletter got pushed to the end of the month, and now it’s crept into October.
So what are going to talk about in this issue?
Upcoming issues of the bi-weekly Substack Newsletter.
Future AI and Games YouTube videos (which appear as case studies here on the Substack)
Upcoming content on AI and Games Plus on YouTube, which also includes the Branching Factor podcast.
Plus some updates on announcements coming soon for both the AI and Games Conference and the upcoming Kickstarter for Goal State.
As always, parts of the newsletter are made available for everyone to enjoy, but to find out more about what’s coming up, and also give feedback and suggestions, please consider signing up as a paid supporter right here on AI and Games.
General Production Update
I won’t lie, it’s been a crazy couple of months. With Goal State ramping up behind the scenes, plus the conference going from ‘nice idea’ to ‘oh my god we’re running it in less than 6 weeks time’ (36 days from today in fact), plus speaking at events, actual client work, and of course producing content, it’s been a little stressful.
I feel like today, funnily enough, is things beginning to ease down. The conference in particular had a lot of organisation issues we had to mitigate early. While we have a team of people organising it, I am the lead organiser and a lot of responsibilities fall on me. Full disclosure this was to be expected: the rest of the team all work full-time jobs for other businesses (me, I run my own business), and particularly for our advisory board they can’t be involved in the organisational logistics and business operations, but can handle content and editorial. But I feel like we’ve got a lot of things down. As discussed later in this issue, the talks are finalised, we’re smoothing out the schedule now, and then it’s just the hard part of putting the event on in London - but we thankfully have not only Alan working at the university the event is hosted at, but also George and Sally handling a lot of the venue logistics and communications.
Plus of course in the background I’m working on getting Goal State up and running. As mentioned previously, Goal State was always planned for 2024, but the conference was not. Sadly it’s difficult to fund raise and advertise a conference at the same time as crowdfunding an online course series (too many mixed messages). So Goal State was pushed back, but I am working on it behind the scenes, and we recently did drop a huge content update on what to expect if (no, when) we successfully crowdfund the first course: Game AI 101.
Plus in the past week or so, I’ve got back to doing the thing I love the most: writing and making videos. These are the two things I love to do the most, but also are difficult to ensure regular content updates. I’m grateful for the reception the Substack has received this year, and I would love if the bi-weekly episodes could also become bi-weekly YouTube videos on AI and Games Plus. I think that’s the task of a production assistant should we ever get to the point that is financially viable.
But critically, I am in a wonderful position where I have around five different projects for the main AI and Games YouTube channel in different stages of production, and we’ll have a couple of them coming your way very soon!
Okay, enough of me moaning about workloads, let’s talk about upcoming content!
Future Newsletter Issues
Let’s talk about the newsletter. The numbers here on Substack continue to grow! In fact, I expect the newsletter to break 2000 subscribers in the next month or two. We’ve seen some good growth that also experiences spikes whenever I attend a venue and give a talk.
Plus here’s a fun fact, I noticed that this newsletter and
by my buddy are kinda joined at the hip? Our recommendation numbers are close to the same. Plus, when George gets a spike in new subscribers (like he did last week after being name dropped on ‘The Rest is Entertainment’ podcast), then I get a residual from that.So anyway, content wise I recently smashed out a bunch of topics, notably the 2024 GDMC Competition, my Little Learning Machines deep dive and then the SAG-AFTRA strike - which is both my longest issue to-date and probably my favourite thing I’ve written this year. But what else is coming? Here’s a quick list of newsletter topics we’re going to be seeing soon:
That EA Investor Day Presentation: Good lord was that embarrassing. I watched the recording of the event on public transport and was cringing so hard in a public place I had to turn it off. I want to talk about not just how desperate it looked, but also the fantastic work that EA already do in AI that seems to be largely dusted under the rug with this public display.
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