At some point in 2024 I spun up a second channel Horsing Around w/Polka Cowboy. Everyone needs a second channel right!? Well mine hit monetization on March 16th 2026.
Originally I was going to use it to just drop the complete raw footage for the challenge runs I’ve done so there was proof I didn’t fake it or something paranoid like that. Long story short, I uploaded a few videos but never really utilized the channel this way.
The big issue for me was that while recording playthroughs for these highly edited videos, I didn’t bother doing any live commentary. I was doing all the voice work after the fact from a script so I didn't see a need to talk the whole time. So these videos would either just be quiet gameplay, or I’d have to sit down and provide new commentary for the videos.
So for a long time it mostly went unused. I didn’t want to upload just quiet videos, and I’d rather sink my creative time working on new videos vs freshening up the old footage.
I posted a few clips to it and at least one very low effort video. Not that low effort is inherently a bad thing that can’t do well. It’s just by this point everything on the main channel was so highly produced that I felt it might feel weird to start dropping stuff I recorded in a few minutes on it. Regardless, I didn’t add much of those to the second channel.
But since the dawn of the main channel there has been something I haven’t really been able to figure out. Project Zomboid. And it was this Project Zomboid problem that made me rethink the second channel's purpose.
The thing about Project Zomboid is that it is kind of a hard game to make content for. Well, at least the kind of content I like to make.
The game can be very grindy, and is very unforgiving as all it takes is one miscalculation to end a run. Without save scumming or roleplaying a way to be reborn or use multiple characters, A LOT of hours can be pissed away before achieving the goal.
The Project Zomboid One Block Challenges were one solution to this problem. Make the inevitable death be the goal, and focus on how the journey would differ from a typical playthrough.
But I still had this list of Grand Objectives to complete. And I just wasn’t good enough at Zomboid to ever actually finish any of these goals.
In the summer of 2025 I decided to take on of these grand objectives again and started a playthrough. And I had a lot of fun on this playthrough. It was looking to be a good story, and would have made a good video. But then after like 20+ hours of the playthrough things went awry and I died. And at that point I was still so far from completing the objective that it wouldn’t have been worth editing into a long form video.
I lingered on that Zomboid death for several months. That was a lot of effort for naught. It wasn’t an atypical amount of effort for a playthrough. But in other games if I sink that many hours into something, usually I know that I can reach the goal. One setback doesn't end it all. Project Zomboid is just built differently.
I also didn’t want to post edits of the run in progress as I went along on the main channel in case it did fail way before having a solid story ending. But on the second channel where the expectation is that you’re following the story wholly knowing it may end early? That sounded more pleasant.
But there was a rub
Live streaming or live commentary while playing is a different skill than editing a script from the footage. I might spend several showers going over variations of a video’s intro until it hits just right. But to just sit and play for 20+ hours while talking and keeping things interesting? That was something else, and I didn’t have any experience in it.
But I figured if I did want to get use out of this longplay footage instead of casting it into the void, that I better learn. So throughout the challenges of trying to drive a wagon full of corpses across the RDR2 map, I started practicing with live commentary.
In the six months since I think I’m actually getting a handle on the live commentary. And now that those efforts also have gotten the second channel monetized, it is nice to at least see some coins for the time spent making these videos before the final edit is actually complete.
I have more thoughts on live commentary vs scripted videos in general, but I’ll save them for a different blog post later down the line.