🕑 Added 2015-01-12 17:12:30 +0000 UTC
It's been a year since I started TabletopAudio.com with 12 tracks and a shrug.
Last January, I had only recently started playing RPGs again. This time, it was with my 2 kids, 30 years after I had last played. During our first session I had a brain flash about how to make the game a little... cooler, more immersive. I should tell you, at this point I hadn't heard of RPG audio, and to be honest, I naively thought I was onto something earth-shatteringly new.
I knew I had a hard drive full of audio remnants. Ex client projects. Rejections. Bits of musical ideas, bits of sound design elements, library sounds. Basic creative bycatch and detritus. I thought maybe, with some polish, these could be turned into decent, unobtrusive background beds suitable for our games. I spent about a month tweaking them into shape. I dusted off some coding and web design skills from a previous life and fired tabletopaudio.com and a dozen ambiences into the aether. I told myself it was an experiment.
It's been an incredibly interesting year.
I can say, without reservation, that the experiment has been largely successful. Feedback has been almost all positive - and where it wasn’t, it contained helpful suggestions. Like the time I got chewed out on Reddit for having committed multiple sins against the gods of graphic design - followed by a bulleted list of how to go about repenting.
In the past 12 months I have heard from bloggers, podcasters, live-streamers, players and GMs that the site has enhanced their gaming sessions and helped with session prep. I've read discussion threads about people who enjoy playing ambiences with their favorite board games. I've heard from writers who use ambiences to get themselves in the mood for writing. I tweet now. I feel like I opened a door.
As the site has grown, so has the amount of time I spend on it. I have received hundreds of requests for ambiences and have honored many of them. I have a full backlog of requests that I jokingly refer to as "The List™". I’ve had to learn code-y things like Javascript and jQuery. I’ve spent hours googling things like “looping through associative arrays”, after which I look in the mirror and say “who even are you?”. I’ve had to get better at Photoshop, CSS and...gulp... promotion. People asked for track downloads for offline use so I made that happen, they asked for ways to save playlists and link to playlists so I figured out how to make that happen (after so much googling).
I put a PayPal button on the site and a few of you clicked it and donated. I started a Patreon campaign and some more of you signed up and said “keep doing what you’re doing”. I got nominated for something called an ‘ENnie’ at a mysterious event called ‘GenCon’. The door I opened seemed to be leading into a larger room than I thought.
Almost one year to the day after launch, Patreon donations are to a point that they’re practically covering my bandwidth costs. (This, thanks in no small part to a certain tabletop impresario's well timed facebook post.) There are 65 tracks, over 10 hours of audio online. I’ve added downloads, playlist saving and direct linking. Visitor counts are rising steadily each month, as are plays and downloads.
So now it’s 2015. The experiment I started in 2014 seems to be achieving...something. Recognition? Appreciation? Usefulness? I joke to my friends that my new venture is making me “dozens of dollars….DOZENS!”. To that, I’ll go ahead and admit seriously: I would like to make more money with the site. At least in terms of justifying the hours spent. I’m going to spend some time this year trying to think of ways to do that. Ways that don’t make me cringe. Ways that uphold my “lawful good” alignment.
Amanda Palmer, in her popular TED talk, and now book, makes asking people for money seem easy. And who knows, for a statuesque, beautiful chanteuse with a penchant for public nudity it probably is. But I’m none of those things, and frankly, I have such an aversion to asking for things people assume I’m British. Possibly Canadian.
As my first year comes to an end, more than anything, I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone that has supported the site. Thank you to those who have written nice things about it in podcasts, blog posts and forums, and thank you to those who have supported Tabletop Audio financially. Thank you.
I’m looking forward to a second interesting year.
best wishes,
Tim
gm@tabletopaudio.com
Twitter: @TabletopAudio
facebook: facebook.com/tabletopaudio
