Attention Institute Personnel!
After some close calls, the Earth has finally completed another orbit around the sun
and that seems like as good an excuse as any to reflect on the last year
and talk about what we have planned for the next one.
Now in this reality at least, 2021 was pretty rough, but in the pocket dimension
in which the Templin Institute resides, things actually went pretty well. In fact, I dare say
it might have been our best year yet. Hopefully there’s no direct correlation there.
Over the last 12 months we introduced a new division to the Institute,
Arsenal; and the investigations they’ve performed into the weapons, vehicles,
and other constructs from across alternate worlds have gotten a tremendous response.
We embraced longform content, creating mammoth guides on how to build a tank force for your
interstellar army, or launch a planetary assault, and broke the first time, the fabled 1 hour
barrier. We began to reimagine alternate worlds, most notably creating new ideas of what the First
Order and New Republic might have been. In our own reality, we raised the banner of victory
atop the Banff Springs Hotel and commanded a T-72 main battle tank on the outskirts of Budapest.
We bought the story of the Antares Confederacy to a close and became Twitch partners in the process.
And in just the last month we’ve also expanded the kinds of rewards offered to Patrons,
with campaign ribbons, patches, and more. It’s impossible to discuss everything we did last
year without this video becoming even more of a smug, self-congratulatory mess then it is already.
What I think I’m most excited about however, are Templin Dispatches;
unscripted thought pieces that allow us to cover certain elements from alternate worlds
much quicker than we’d previously been able. Dispatches are going to be a foundational part
of the Institute in 2022, both because they allow us to release more content in any given week,
but also because they’re a good way to help us recover from mammoth episodes
or go on vacation without putting the channel on pause. I am very grateful to have been able
to conduct a field investigation in Atlanta for a month without the channel imploding.
Even with a month long break from the usual content though,
I am incredibly proud to say that the Templin Institute produced more minutes worth of scripted
investigations in 2021 than any previous year, and by a pretty wide margin. I’m not sure this
is exactly the healthiest way to gauge the success of the channel, and we’re not necessarily going to
actively try to beat this record in 2022, but if nothing else it’s a great indicator of what
the Templin Institute can accomplish when run with even a small degree of competence.
Even so, there are still a few items on our to-do list. The Templin Podcast remains
in limbo and I’m hoping to take another crack at getting it out there this year.
We’ve also occasionally talked about creating a Templin Institute forum,
a place for in-depth worldbuilding discussion that aren’t really suited for Discord. And we also need
to get back to producing regular Q&As and other bonus content on the Templin Archives channel.
Aside from that though, there’s a few other ideas I’d love to try out in 2022.
The first are some sort of theme months, where we exclusively produce content from a specific
Templin Institute division. A dossier month for example investigating legendary figures each week.
At the time this video goes live there should be a poll in the community section here on Youtube
asking which Division you’d like to see take over for a month. We won’t necessarily listen to you,
but it doesn't hurt to take the temperature of the room so to speak.
And of course, we have to think about the next iteration of Stellaris Invicta. I can’t speculate
on when it will return, or in what form, but rest assured we’ll be using everything we learned in
Season 2 to make Season 3 hopefully even better. We might even try something completely different,
who knows. Maybe Season 3 is a dating simulator? Just thinking out loud.
That is just the briefest of looks into what we have planned for 2022,
but I’d like to hear your thoughts. Was there an area in which you think the Templin Institute did
particularly well or needs some improvement last year? Any ideas for what we should try
this year? Let me know in the comments below, and thank you all so much for your support.