My Podcasting Experience

"The Six Sided Ring of Fire Presents..." is the podcast that Jay and I have been "working on" for years.  The both of us wanted to do a podcast and have been talking about it for as long as I can remember, but taking the first step was hard.  It's way easier to plan than it is to actually start the recorder and blab away.  Once we did we learned that we need a ton of work and have a long road ahead of us if we want to make this awesome.  I've included the first attempt below.  If you want to listen to it, it's here:


The original plan was to do a video podcast and have the both of us in game doing something that we'd talk about.  If we were talking about MOBAs, we'd play a MOBA.  If we were talking about RPGs, we'd play RPGs... etc etc etc This caused its own set of problems that became abundantly clear after sitting down and working on the first episode.

1. I can't focus on two things at once.  I was mind wiped by shiny things on screen many times while trying to record this episode.
2. Video podcasts are huge files.  This restricts the places it can go and reduces the interest level from people involved.  It was explained to me that most people just wanted mp3 files so they could listen while doing something else.
3. We needed a better, smaller topic.  Our first podcast, linked above, is about Free to Play games.  That's such a huge topic that we ended up just skimming a whole bunch of information instead of driving home a focused point.  The comment I received most often about the first podcast was that "It was like a more focused stream chat."  When I brought that feedback to Jay his response was "Is that what we're aiming for?"  No.  It's not.  We need a more focused topic so we can get deeper.  Broad topics are simply too shallow.
4. Hardware needs to be tested every single time.  I had set up my gear in a new way and because of that I came out way louder than Jay even though we had tested the day before.  It took a good amount of time to learn how to normalize the audio and I still sound odd in the recording.  It's very important to test extensively before trying to record.

So, we recorded episode 2: How to be a better game consumer last night and it was much better:


We took on a much smaller topic, prepped ourselves much better, and kept an eye on the clock to avoid going too long.  The goal was an hour and it ran 1:10.  I think the intro needs work.  I had no idea how to intro the show and when I did it came off awkward.  Once we got started it became a solid presentation.  That lasted until about the 50 minute mark when I felt like we started repeating ourselves and circling the same topics.  If I had noticed it earlier I would have tried to wrap it up.  The goal for the next podcast will be to have a stronger intro and ending to give it a better feel, but the rest of it is actually very solid.  We took aim at a topic and hit it the entire time.  We made actual points that were backed up with data.  We had examples of everything we wanted to cover and it came across very strong.  Obviously, we can do much better, but from episode zero to one we've come a long way.

I'd love to hear what you guys think.  Leave a comment below, get me on twitter (twitter.com/t6srof), send me an email (t6srof@gmail.com), or just stop on by the stream and say hi (twitch.tv/t6srof).