I'm not going to lie, we patterned ourselves closely on the Fast Karate model out of a desire to not fix what wasn't broke and to edit as minimally as possible. It's a first podcast (we recorded a few test episodes) so obviously it sucks, as all early episodes do, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out all things considering and am looking forward to doing more.
I'm not going to lie, we patterned ourselves closely on the Fast Karate model out of a desire to not fix what wasn't broke and to edit as minimally as possible. It's a first podcast (we recorded a few test episodes) so obviously it sucks, as all early episodes do, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out all things considering and am looking forward to doing more.
Dude every time I try and bring back my decrepit podcast I just end up aping off Dave and Joel's. I think that is just standard mode of operation with it's just a couple of dudes with no real hardcore audio editing knowledge.
Also real talk when I saw the name of the podcast I said something along the lines of "Fuck, I should have thought of that."
I'm not going to lie, we patterned ourselves closely on the Fast Karate model out of a desire to not fix what wasn't broke and to edit as minimally as possible. It's a first podcast (we recorded a few test episodes) so obviously it sucks, as all early episodes do, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out all things considering and am looking forward to doing more.
You're right, the podcast does suck. I stopped listening after about 15 seconds. Then I thought I'd be kind and listen more, but stopped again about 3 minutes in. Then I tried again, and stopped after about 6 minutes. Please post here again when you don't think the podcast sucks, and I'll give it another go.
Tips:
Don't make a feature out of bad technical execution.
Have an intro.
Tell us who you are.
Tell us what the podcast is about, or who it is for.
Don't laugh at your own jokes. Really.
Have a topic and talk about it. There is no reason to start with off-topic anything. In the first episode there is literally no reason we care about anything you say about anything, not until you have proved you can form opinions and argue them well. Get to it!
Yeah, I'm really not setting out to make some kind of like, informative or critically insightful show. It was basically borne out of the realization that our mutual favourite form of podcast was "2+ people rambling about shit" format, because it's really good at filling hours with background noise. As we both work shit jobs, those things are lifesavers, so we'd figure we'd pay it forward a bit.
We've already talked about a better kind of format for a sort of loose organization so we'd have something to go back to. Like, less "segments" and more "have one of each of these topics prepped and whenever we flag we'll pop back to each one in order" kind of deal.
That's cool. I'm not knocking you attempting anything, but there's no way I can listen to this. And I listen to loads of podcasts with two people rambling about shit. But no matter what, I only stick with the shit they ramble about because I know they will return to them saying something insightful about a topic they know more about than me. That's it. That's the key. That's the format.
Your podcast title, website, episode title, intro, rambling topic... none of this left me any clue as to the real topic of conversation or debate. You only need that one small hook. Just tell me what might happen at some point in the next hour and twenty minutes that is worth my time.
Fair enough. Keep in mind that "People way cooler than us", such as yourself, basically cannot be the target audience of this. :P
We're both game devs, so we'll see what we can do about getting more of that content in so we can actually talk about stuff we're kind of smart about on occasion. We're also trying to schedule out our content better so we can have more in-depth conversations about it; the Wolfenstein topic was probably a bad one to start with, as we picked it as simply the last game we both played at roughly the same time and it turned out we didn't have as much to say about it as we thought. Our next topic set is a bit closer to heart so we should be able to actually, like, say smart things, maybe.
You started almost saying interesting things about open world games. As in, what might be added to make them unique. But then you didn't go into any depth at all. I'd be interested in that discussion.
You started almost saying interesting things about open world games. As in, what might be added to make them unique. But then you didn't go into any depth at all. I'd be interested in that discussion.
We're talking about Blood Dragon in the next one, which suffers pretty hard from a lot of the problems of open-world, minimal interaction games, so I'll make a note to talk about that a bunch.
We practiced for months before we put even a first episode online. (Those episodes are out there if you look hard enough). It took us a while to get a natural rhythm for radio.
More importantly, we made a strict structure and forced ourselves to follow it for a long, long time.
From 8-12:30 I repotted cacti and learned how to maintain a rainwater cistern, then I ate, went to class, wrote an essay, wrote a song, measured the circumference of 40 trees on either side of a ridge, and read the last chapter of Deep Economy in one sitting while I ate again. Now I'm gonna summarize that chapter and study statistics, then crash from all this nicotine, amphetamine, and caffeine with the force of a German airship and the precision of a German watch at 10:30 so I can be in the shower by 6:30 tomorrow morning.
My non-shit-talk of the day is multifold. New episode of the podcast where we actually kinda edited, took notes on stuff, and talked a lot more in-depth about our topics, I finished the layout prep for my party RPG Collateral Damage, and also I got a bunch of sketchwork done for art for my Magical Girl RPG. And worked a Thanksgiving shift.
Fair enough. I will strive to improve on those areas!
Don't feel bad about laughing at your own jokes. I do it all the time and Victor insists that we probably still have listeners.
I'm as surprised about it as anyone, frankly. Episode 81 has nearly 1000 downloads and 82 is well on it's way. Some older ones have 4-5k downloads. Apparently people like the steaming piles we put out every month. *shrug*
Fair enough. I will strive to improve on those areas!
Don't feel bad about laughing at your own jokes. I do it all the time and Victor insists that we probably still have listeners.
I'm as surprised about it as anyone, frankly. Episode 81 has nearly 1000 downloads and 82 is well on it's way. Some older ones have 4-5k downloads. Apparently people like the steaming piles we put out every month. *shrug*
Fun Fax - according to the website, downloads spike whenever we have Ro, Omar or Jason on the show.
Booked a flight for MagFest so it is fairly set in stone now. I'll ask for the time off in January so it isn't forgotten, and probably book a hotel around that time as well.
Last August I started talking about developing three club combat into a more organized, fair, entertaining and accessible sport. 15 months later, and a shit ton of work, I've launched the Fight Night Combat website with its own domain and new look and everything. It's officially out of beta!
There used to be between two and four Fight Night tournaments per year, and no kind of collection of results or tracking players over time. Also all the tournaments were organized on an ad-hoc basis, mostly by invitation only, so it was the same dozen or so players appearing in very few tournaments.
This year, by promoting the rankings, the tournaments, and generally all I could, there are now 22 tournaments listed in for the last 365 day rankings, with over 200 players taking part. Of course, many more players than that, but in different tournaments not everyone who doesn't qualify is listed.
Next year there are already 28 tournaments scheduled for 2015, and many more will happen, I'm sure. I'm also going to soon announce the end of 2015 European Masters, where the top 10 players in Europe will battle it out in Berlin next December. With that added bragging-rights incentive, I hope the top players will start taking it a bit more seriously too.
I started using GameMaker today and made a game where you click on a balloon and a game that is just 1945. I'd made 1945 before with a couple other students for Windows Phone as a school project and it took us about three times as long as it took me to make it in GameMaker. Although we had to write the engine and whatnot.
My plan is to create an interactive website in GameMaker for my projects and resume, but I'm not there yet. Seems like it is pretty doable though.
I am in the process of testing some software that will allow my spreadsheet of board games to be a database with a check in and check out functionality for any dumbass to do.
Just printed a prototype of my next RPG booklet, 18 pages with covers and character sheets. All that's left on it is the internal artwork. Feelin' pretty good, not gonna lie.
In response to the new Terminator trailer and the fucking awesome T-1000 shenanigans, I wrote a sequel to Abort Retry Fail where you play a liquid metal terminator hunting down the terminator from the first game. I am testing it right now.
Comments
I'm not going to lie, we patterned ourselves closely on the Fast Karate model out of a desire to not fix what wasn't broke and to edit as minimally as possible. It's a first podcast (we recorded a few test episodes) so obviously it sucks, as all early episodes do, but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out all things considering and am looking forward to doing more.
Also real talk when I saw the name of the podcast I said something along the lines of "Fuck, I should have thought of that."
Tips:
Don't make a feature out of bad technical execution.
Have an intro.
Tell us who you are.
Tell us what the podcast is about, or who it is for.
Don't laugh at your own jokes. Really.
Have a topic and talk about it. There is no reason to start with off-topic anything. In the first episode there is literally no reason we care about anything you say about anything, not until you have proved you can form opinions and argue them well. Get to it!
We've already talked about a better kind of format for a sort of loose organization so we'd have something to go back to. Like, less "segments" and more "have one of each of these topics prepped and whenever we flag we'll pop back to each one in order" kind of deal.
Your podcast title, website, episode title, intro, rambling topic... none of this left me any clue as to the real topic of conversation or debate. You only need that one small hook. Just tell me what might happen at some point in the next hour and twenty minutes that is worth my time.
We're both game devs, so we'll see what we can do about getting more of that content in so we can actually talk about stuff we're kind of smart about on occasion. We're also trying to schedule out our content better so we can have more in-depth conversations about it; the Wolfenstein topic was probably a bad one to start with, as we picked it as simply the last game we both played at roughly the same time and it turned out we didn't have as much to say about it as we thought. Our next topic set is a bit closer to heart so we should be able to actually, like, say smart things, maybe.
We practiced for months before we put even a first episode online. (Those episodes are out there if you look hard enough). It took us a while to get a natural rhythm for radio.
More importantly, we made a strict structure and forced ourselves to follow it for a long, long time.
Ah, life.
Get on my level, forum.
There used to be between two and four Fight Night tournaments per year, and no kind of collection of results or tracking players over time. Also all the tournaments were organized on an ad-hoc basis, mostly by invitation only, so it was the same dozen or so players appearing in very few tournaments.
This year, by promoting the rankings, the tournaments, and generally all I could, there are now 22 tournaments listed in for the last 365 day rankings, with over 200 players taking part. Of course, many more players than that, but in different tournaments not everyone who doesn't qualify is listed.
Next year there are already 28 tournaments scheduled for 2015, and many more will happen, I'm sure. I'm also going to soon announce the end of 2015 European Masters, where the top 10 players in Europe will battle it out in Berlin next December. With that added bragging-rights incentive, I hope the top players will start taking it a bit more seriously too.
All of this to say: launch new sport.... check!
So stoked to have it running soon
My plan is to create an interactive website in GameMaker for my projects and resume, but I'm not there yet. Seems like it is pretty doable though.