Here we are then. Participating in the call were Vader, Lex, Carlie and myself, though Carlie was mostly playing Witcher 3.
Content
We agreed that news about Final Fantasy and related games/franchises should play an important part in the show. I suggested that we could begin the show with a quick roundup of news stories before moving onto discussion and other features.
We want to get the audience more involved in the podcast. We could read comments on the show and respond to them. Vader also suggested we could invite people to ask for Final Fantasy game tips. It feels a bit old-fashioned to me, since there's a lot of information easily available on the internet already, but maybe that's part of the charm.
We can have "shows within the show", recurring features that take up, say, five minutes in each episode. Some ideas we had for this are:
- Updates on Final Fantasy XIV (and possibly XI) from someone who actively plays it.
- A Final Fantasy retrospective where we look at each game in the series individually.
- A play-along series (a "book club for games", as I described it) where the guests on the show play through a game together and discuss their experiences, again encouraging audience participation as well. There could be some overlap with our existing community events, like the community playthroughs.
- Interviews with creators of fan works - people who have remixed Final Fantasy music, published fan art or fiction, and so on.
Structure/participants
We discussed some other podcasts we listen to for comparison. I think all the shows we listen to have permanent hosts and more or less the same guests in each show. As a listener, that's part of the appeal - you get to know the personalities and can follow what's going on in their lives (e.g. what games they're playing). That's the structure we're going to go with.
Vader offered to be the host (as well as the editor/publisher). I'd be happy to give him a go, but as we've had other people hosting in the past, Lex thought it would be a good idea to ask in this thread first in case anyone objects. So, what do you say? I know he's new but he's definitely got the enthusiasm for this that everyone else seems to be lacking.
We thought we'd try and keep the shows reasonably small, with about three guests in each episode in addition to the host. This isn't a hard limit; two or four would also be fine, depending on how many people are available. My thinking is that we'll have a pool of about six guests who we can rotate depending on what we're going to be covering in a particular episode. So if there's been some Kingdom Hearts news, for example, we can invite someone on who is knowledgeable on the series. I'd hardly be able to put two words together on the subject myself. Well, apart from "Kingdom" and "Hearts".
Lex and I both volunteered to appear on the show. If I recall correctly, Carlie wasn't so committal (maybe because she was distracted), but said she was available as well. I looked through this thread to see who had recently contributed ideas or indicated a desire to take part, and found Airling and Tres. I'd like to know if those two are still interested, and the same goes for everyone else, too. We're not going to open every episode to everyone who wants to join any more, since that contributed to the disorganised scheduling and recording of the show in the past, but we do need to know who we can call on.
We (probably Vader, after discussion) will post an agenda ahead of each show so the guests know what they might need to read up on. I don't mind giving him editorial control to decide what segments are included - we can pitch our ideas to him.
Scheduling
This is important: we're going to commit to recording at the same time, every time. That time is going to be in the afternoon/early evening for Northern Americans and in the late evening for Europeans. That time is the best compromise, since 90% of our community (at a guess) comes from those two regions. It's unfair to have a show that is exclusive to one particular region. We're not trying to exclude people from the other 10%, either, but they might find the timing is awkward.
We're going to aim for a show every two weeks, or every fortnight, as some people call it.
The thinking is that any more would be too much for the host and guests, but any less would be too little for our listeners. We'll adapt if necessary/possible. We'll probably leave this thread for podcast discussion only, making a new one for podcast organising and then a new, separate thread for every published episode.
Vader suggested using Google Hangouts instead of Skype for better sound quality. I'm totally fine with that since Skype is horrible. We'll expect all our guests to have decent microphones/headsets, which means I'll need to get one myself.
Editing and promotion
Vader said he can take care of the editing. We're going to try to keep the shows at a more or less constant length of 45-60 minutes each. Episodes will be published on the front page and iTunes. Vader, I think those Bulb covers are a bit too heavy to be our theme music. We have a lot of music hosted on TLS already, so it would make sense to use something from there, like Pixel did with HypochondriacPiano's arrangements in the past. Nothing too melancholy though.
We also need to make sure we have permission to use whatever music we end up using.
Thoughts?