It took a little work and some fiddly bits needed to be figured out, but in the words of my daughter, “Congration – you done it”.
The Groves of Inan YouTube channel is now live. Videos will be uploaded over the next few weeks, as the channel allows. I’ve still got the training wheels on and YouTube has put limits on the tools I can use and how many videos I can upload at one time. I’ll give more background on here as I go, but if you’re at all interested, here it is:
Writing scripts – the list of what I want to say when starting off a video – is now a thing.
I suppose I’ve been doing that for quite some time actually. I never really thought about it when I was playing in my friend’s game and he was twitch streaming it all. It was just our little group doing their thing. Then I started running my D&D game. That was when I realized that I was making little things to say at the start of each session. I’ve never thought of it as “script writing” really, but I suppose that’s exactly what it is.
Until now (and maybe still beyond now) I’ve been physically writing down the things I want to say using a color coded piece of graph paper and sort of reading from that. Even when I write the words, the things I say don’t always line up with what I wrote. Sometimes that works, sometimes I “out clever” myself and screw up what was a funny written line. Of course, recording live, it’s not like I can just say “cut” and do it again. We’re live, and getting ready to play.
Our little videos are not production pieces (clearly).We don’t have makeup, wardrobe or sponsors. Nor do I expect we will have those at any point in our lives. It’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get a group of friends together and have fun.
So, I’ll keep writing my little intro bits but maybe I’ll make them electronic and post them up along with the videos of my game sessions. We’ll see. This is a learning process. It will take time for me to figure it all out.
I was spending some of my free time roaming through news feeds I keep track of and websites I like to keep up on when I stumbled across this interesting challenge. Yes, it’s a “new years” thing that I said I *very specifically* DO NOT DO, but it does seem like it could be fun.
The challenge was in this article [here]. The short version is, every day you draw and describe a single room in your dungeon. Just one. Doesn’t take monumental effort, but what it does take is consistency. Being constantly at something I can do. Making small adjustments and keeping the path.
What I’m not going to do… is a dungeon. Yes, I know that’s the idea, but I’m going really dig into the details of a city in my game world called Lithia. The Free City of Lithia will need maps and buildings and markets and so very many things… that can be made a day at a time as I go.
The best part is that I’d already started. I’ve been developing my game world for a long time now and this is just an easy spot to land. I’ve got a sketchbook and a partial city map. I don’t really need to overthink anything (as the article says), I can just make stuff up.
I’m excited to see how this all goes, and will post updates from time to time (perhaps more frequently – add a comment if you’re interested in seeing this more).