Operation: Thundershark is Go!

Attention Institute Personnel! 

It’s finally happened - Operation: Thundershark has launched! If you haven’t already, check out the first investigation released as part of Templin 2.0.

As we’ve said before, Thundershark is a visual redesign for our channel and Twitch streams, a completely new and improved store, and some updates to our Patreon page. We’d like to delve further into all the changes we’ve made for Thundershark, and explain the reasons behind some of the choices we’ve made. 

The single biggest element of Templin 2.0 -- I mean Thundershark -- is the visual update for our videos. As you could see in our Imperial Guard video, we’ve dramatically changed all our UI and HUD elements - most notably, the introduction sequence and end screen. The reason for this change was two-fold: first, it just looks way cooler. There are a lot of little details in this new sequence that hopefully make it feel sleeker and smoother, and it’s more closely aligned with a lot of design principles that we’ve established as part of the Templin brand. 

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, is that it is much easier on our back end. The original design, Templin 1.0, relied heavily on a patchwork of elements that didn’t function too well together. This meant that rendering times were much longer than they needed to be. Templin 1.0 was also not intended to function on the scale we’ve been working at. It contained a lot of inefficiencies that made mistakes hard to catch and even more difficult to fix. Even when everything went right, an episode would need to be rendered three or four times, and when things went wrong, it could take a dozen additional renders to fix everything. 

With the new design, we’ve built on the knowledge gained after 2 years of producing episodes. While the new design is much more complex and visually appealing, it’s also easier to edit and fix problems when they crop up. Now those simple mistakes won’t be made, or at least not as frequently, and when they do happen they’ll be relatively easy to fix. This is a huge time saving measure that will hopefully smoothen our workflow and give us more time to work on other more exciting projects, rather than fixing mistakes.

A similar idea applies to Twitch. While it’s not as arduous a process to produce a stream, we weren’t satisfied with how our layout used to look. The original layout for Twitch had the gameplay window taking up about two thirds of the screen, which, while fine on a television or monitor, made it harder to watch on a mobile device. After taking a closer look at our metrics and hearing fan feedback, we decided to put a greater emphasis on the game capture window rather than the (admittedly awesome) UI. This new UI is less intrusive and more visually consistent with our main YouTube channel’s new design. 

As for the store, we put a lot of time and work into that as well. While Marc was oscillating between lamenting his failures and proclaiming his genius in After Effects, I was researching eCommerce platforms, online store best practices, and Print on Demand suppliers. (Seriously guys, you should see the pitch document I made.) We also looked closely at our audience, our past customers, and their shopping habits to see what would be important to them. We discovered that the majority of the visitors to our original store were mobile users, but the store wasn’t optimized for mobile, so many people were leaving before looking at the products we had to offer. 

Speaking of products, we weren’t fully satisfied with the quality or variety we had available before. While our original supplier, Teespring, had quite a few products, they weren’t necessarily the ones we would have wanted, such as flags. Printing and shipping also took a very long time, especially for customers in Europe. 

We decided to build a custom store from scratch with Shopify, and settled on printing most of our merchandise through Printful. Customer reviews for Printful products are consistently high, and after working with a representative with Printful directly, we feel confident in their customer service and client support. They have fulfillment centers in the US, the EU, and Mexico, which means much faster turnaround times and we have the option to special order custom products from somewhere else, send it to Printful, and have them ship the products to our customers for us. 

However, Printful doesn’t (at the moment) carry flags or mugs, two of our most requested products, so we also partnered with Teelaunch. If you order a flag and a phone case, they will be shipping from two different suppliers, and will be delivered at different times. Teelaunch on average runs slower than Printful, so expect these products to take a bit of extra time. Trust us though, they’re worth it. 

As for the designs themselves, we liked the approach we had taken previously but thought we could go even further. All our products are designed to fit into the aesthetic and lore of the Institute itself, so we focussed on including a greater variety of Templin Division products and whatever other designs we thought looked cool. Flags have always been a huge part of the Institute and now we’re finally able to offer a wide selection to the loyal citizens of the Greater Terran Union! Not only do we have the national flag of the GTU available, but all 17 planetary commissariat designs as well. 

Lastly, Patreon. We had a bunch of ideas for changes to make with Patreon, but ran out of time to work on them unfortunately, so they’ll have to wait for another time. Let’s say Templin 2.5, or Operation: LightningFish. The one big change we did make, however, was removing the $1 tier. After extensive research and discussions with other content creators, we realized that approximately 30% of that dollar was being used for credit card and Patreon fees. Supporting us for 12 months at that level would charge you $12 but we’d only receive about $7.20. After reading the results of our Patreon feedback form, we discovered that most of our Patreon supporters were doing it to support us. It doesn’t make sense to ask those people to pay Patreon instead. At the $2 tier, only about 25% of the amount is being spent on Patreon and other fees. 

To be clear, those people who have already pledged at $1 will continue to be charged $1. We won’t take away the rewards they already receive, and for as long as they stay at the $1 level, they will continue to pay $1. It’s only new people who become Patreon supporters that will be able to pledge starting at $2. 

At the beginning of the Operation: Thundershark process, we asked our Patreon supporters to fill out a feedback form asking them how they used the rewards we offer, among other questions. We learned a lot of interesting things after going through the answers, so thank you to all those who participated in the survey. 

While this isn’t technically going to be part of Thundershark, we thought we’d include this announcement here. We intend to update the podcast we release from .mp3 versions of all our episodes to some entirely original content. Once a month, we’ll release a podcast where Marc and I discuss [we have to figure out what exactly] for our Security Clearance Victor patrons and above. We’ll also be accepting ideas for conversation topics.

We had ideas for a lot of other things we’d like to update for the channel, but unfortunately ran out of time to get them done. They’ve been added to a secret master list (see: shredded Pizza Hut napkin) and will be addressed when we have the time again. 

Let us know what you think of all the new store designs, the updated channel visuals and what part of Thundershark you’re most excited about! Thundershark, ho!