Forager: The Bittersweet Story of Mariano Cavallero
Channel: Video Game Story Time
Date: 2019-04-19

This video is sponsored by Mariano Cavallero and his brand new game, Forager, published by Humble Bundle! Get it here now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/

This has been one of our favourite videos that we've ever made. A few weeks ago we were contacted by Mariano, who is a fan of the channel and wanted to sponsor a video based on his own story.

Now, here's the thing. We're normally 100% opposed to sponsorship in videos. We were actually contacted over a year ago by a company that wanted to pay us for sponsored video content, and we turned them down. We didn't get into the YouTube game to sell stuff, and we're not keen to start featuring ads within the content of our videos. In fact, we've even recently stopped putting YouTube ad breaks mid-video, because they're getting so annoying.

But, Mariano was different. He wasn't a company reaching out to us to try and use our platform to promote a product. Forager is doing just fine without our paltry influencer endorsement. Instead, Mariano simply wanted the catharsis of seeing his story told through our lens.

We read up on his experiences as a game developer, and it was incredible - exactly the kind of story that Video Game Story Time exists for. The story of Forager is the story of a single video game fan trying his best to learn a new skill, pushing against incredible challenges, hitting rock bottom and never giving up, until he eventually learned to make games, managed to win some awards, and secured a publishing deal with Humble Bundle.

Seriously, just reading up on Mariano's story gave us chills, and we knew you guys would love it. We've had so much fun making this video, and we're hopeful that this will help inspire some other down-on-their-luck developers among you who need a morale boost.

But we didn't feel entirely comfortable about taking Mariano's money for this video, so we reached a compromise: Mariano donated to our Patreon, giving us the average amount of money we make from a typical video, and not a penny more. If we weren't struggling through a financially tight period at the moment we wouldn't even have asked for that. Then, Mariano donated the rest of his budget to the Extra Life charity (https://www.extra-life.org/) which raises money for sick and injured kids.

This felt like the best solution. We really want to see Forager succeed - it was so exciting yesterday as we watched the internet explode with praise for Mariano's game, and we're really glad that we've been able to help, in some small way, to keep him motivated while he was working on his game.

Here's hoping that this is the first of many success stories for the Video Game Story Time community - if you're having a hard time, if you're struggling with your goals, just bear in mind that you're not alone. Mariano made his dreams come true, and you can too, if you keep going!

Lots of love,
BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics)

Title music by Tee Lopes (http://twitter.com/teelopesmusic)

Incidental music: "Music for Manatees" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Mariano's Twitter: https://twitter.com/_HopFrog

If you'd like to learn more about Mariano's journey, check out his own account: https://imgur.com/gallery/OMYL8