A return to Something

I have given some thought to how I want to proceed with my online persona/presence with this blog and as much as I want to be erudite and a chronicler of the history of vidja games I sometimes doubt my ability to do so. In any case I had kind of fallen off while writing my top ten from last year. Honestly it took me way too long to get that done. I should have had that finished by the end of January at the latest, in stead we are here in March where I finally finished all of my text that I wanted to write about each of the games from the last year and I'm not completely happy about it. It's done though so hey finally I can put that behind me and get on with writing this chunk of text.

There were a few things I wanted to do with this blog/my streaming activities when I started. My favorite games sites are CRPG Addict and Giantbomb. I guess I kind of want to emulate those influences but I don't think that I'm capable. From what I understand anyone who wants to enter this space needs to have their own gimmick. The Addict is going through every CRPG in history from number 1 and the folks at Giantbomb are quite funny (not that the Addict isn't he is, he's just seems to take a more academic view). I don't really understand what my shtick should or can be. I am who I am, and I try to be honest about things. I don't know if that can be a successful gimmick but my parents always told me honesty will take you places, so we will see. So unless some company dumps a ton of money into my opinion I'll be honest. Even if a company did try to buy my opinion I would probably try to subvert whatever it is that they were trying to accomplish because that's just kind of who I am.

I've been trying some different stuff to increase viewership on my streams and some of the Youtube videos. I've been told that I should go a little longer with my streams as it will give people some time to tune in, and also that on Youtube people tend to prefer shorter videos. I've been trying to accomplish both of these goals, but as my Youtube videos are pretty much just archives of the streams I do so they need to be both longer and shorter. I've tried to hedge this by starting and stopping recording for Youtube during livestreams it seems like it might be working okay. I've only started trying to do this recently, and have only really succeeded in doing it a couple times during my Shadowrun SNES streams.

I felt that this post needed some pictures.

Which kind of brings up the second set of tactics I've been trying (which I actually enacted first but I guess decided to write about second because of the beautiful segue I'm about to use). I had kind of lost any sense of direction with what I was deciding to stream. So I started over with the game I started the stream with, Shadowrun for the SNES. The thinking here is that sticking with one thing will help accumulate viewers who might tune in to one stream randomly and tune back in on a future broadcast of the same game. This thought came around around the same time that I also decided that doing more streams might again attract more viewers. More people might come by the stream if it's up more often and then tune back in for another stream. My anecdotal evidence is that this has worked somewhat. A few people usually tune in for my during the week streams but the shows I do Sunday evenings for Shadowrun seem to be the most popular ones I do by a fair amount. It honestly makes me a little worried about what I do next for my Sunday show after I finish up with Shadowrun, but I'll figure something out. I've already got some suggestions and ideas for stuff you would like to see feel free to add them in the comments (one thing I would eventually like to try is to play You Don't Know Jack or Drawful with my family, or maybe The Yawhg). With this three day a week schedule I've tried to keep it a little organized with playing old games on Sundays (as of this writing Shadowrun for the SNES), Tuesdays being my day for smaller more indie recent stuff and Thursdays being big "AAA" releases (or are you supposed to type that out triple A?) I guess it is worth noting again for myself if not for anyone else the recent SNES streams I've done have been the most popular streams I've done aside from the Star Citizen streams I've done, which inexplicably get around double the normal amount of viewers I get. Probably because it's not out yet.

I guess going back a little further, though it tracks to about the same time as the previous point I decided to build a better way run the capture. So I built a dedicated machine to run the capture I unfortunately bought two black magic HDMI capture cards which don't seem to work. I think that maybe they're incompatible with the motherboard I'm using, I should probably call them up and see why they aren't working or if in fact they aren't working. I even bought a HDMI scaler to try to get them to work. In any case I went back to the USB capture device that I have and it seems to work okay. I would really like a more direct line into my motherboard but I don't thing that is what is hurting the video quality when it is hurt. The things that seem to affect recordings are the bitrate I set things at. I really wish that OBS would let me set a more highly variable bitrate for the stream while keeping a really high one for local recording. I do think I've come a long way, quality wise, from my initial stream.

To my "reboot" of my Shadowrun playthrough. Like I understand now that if I have my stream playing on the computer I'm recording on I should probably mute it...

I still say ummm... A lot. I'm doing my best to cut that word out of my vocabulary but it's so easy to use... I do feel though that I have progressed, quality wise at least. I know that some people don't like seeing the player's mug on part of the screen but when you play a 4:3 aspect ration game in a 16:9 window filling up the rest of the screen I think accomplishes something. Even if it is just exposing my weird square haired balding mug. 

The most recent thing I've done is create a facebook page for the blog/streams. I've been posting when I go online on Twitter whenever I start a stream, I've not wanted to inundate uninterested Facebook friends with the same info so that is the reason for the creation of the page. So if you want facebook updates on when I'm updating things this is the page to "like". It will be one of the many places that I decide to update when I go online. This is the point at which things start to feel a little weird and like schilling. At some point you have to self advertise though.

At some point I guess it's just all sink or swim, do or die. I've got a few things I'd like to expand to in the pipes, or a few irons in several fires etc. One of the things that I want to try is to have multiple people on in one stream. To get this to really work after my transition from the office to the "basement" I'm looking for a cheap TV (read around 50" around $300). I have a 3 mics that work with my soundboard so I can get something like that going it's just a matter of doing it, and seeing if it works.

Aside from trying a cast with multiple people there are a few things I'd like to try. One is a game of Drawful or Fibbage played while streaming. Another is like I mentioned is multiple people on the same stream. I'm also thinking that if I can swing it a pen and paper game might be cool. I don't really know there are a lot of old games that I want to expose people to enough that it might not be possible to do but I'll work at it again if you have anything you would like to see if you comment I'll see it.

At some point I need to get to writing more posts on stuff whether I end up writing reviews of the old games that I complete I don't know if there is much of a point to it. By the time I complete them I will have played them in their entirety and I'm not sure how much value a review would be but it would be video or text content that I hadn't livestreamed so I'm not sure how much value that has.

In any case that is the state of Piltdown Gaming currently. I should probably write a post about why I have chosen the moniker Piltdown Man at some point. I also need to complete my profiles on several sites, and perhaps create some line art for thumbnails and banner art.