Creaking Shelves 3rd Birthday!

3 years of Creaking Shelves! Goodness. We’ll be starting school soon. Don’t the little ones grow up fast? As has become something of a tradition, these birthday posts are a chance for me to reflect, to look back over the last year and forward to the next year.

This year has been busy! Both with the blog and in real life. Mostly because I got married. That tends to make one busy! I’m pretty proud of myself for managing to maintain quality and quantity of output throughout the planning period, though it certainly got a bit too stressful at times. I very sensibly took an actual break during the honeymoon which has helped me stockpile some content and reduce the pressure. It’s been a pretty relaxing last few weeks actually!

Videos

By far the biggest achievement blog wise has, of course, been the launch of the Creaking Shelves YouTube channel! I am incredibly pleased with what we have done there and from what I can judge, people are certainly enjoying what we are doing. We crossed 400 subscribers and 10000 total views a couple of weeks ago, and the number of positive comments and likes have been positively overwhelming!

The decision to create something quite different to what most YouTube reviewers are doing was absolutely the right one, even if it means we can’t produce nearly as much content. Likewise, the ‘season’ structure to our releases, 6 episode blocks over 6 weeks, and then a long break, was extremely useful. These videos take a lot of time to produce, so the season structure means we aren’t constantly chasing the next release and can take the time to produce the best content we can. It’s also a nightmare to find a weekend where both Robin and I are free to film. I couldn’t imagine trying to do that every month!

Articles

Otherwise, I have stuck to my intended two articles per week. Mostly that’s a continuous flow of reviews covering primarily major, or major-ish releases in a year. I’m still about as far from being on top of the hotness as a penguin, but sometimes I at least feel like I’m a penguin in a temperate zoo. I’ve almost entirely cut out Kickstarter coverage as, unless it’s the biggest new release (like, say, Nemesis), I just wasn’t getting the engagement to justify the effort.

Big thanks (and commiserations, given the recent announcement) to Marc and Chris for providing incredibly in depth reviews of FFG’s Netrunner releases. They’ll be finishing off the last few packs before hanging up their decks and retiring on their stolen mega credits. Meanwhile, I should be getting back to Arkham Horror The Card Game coverage very soon. I have quite the backlog to catch up on at this point! Speaking of catching up, I really should get back to my A-Z of board games series too!

To the Future

I don’t have big plans for dramatic changes to the blog. I will be happy with maintaining what I have. There will be a Which is Greater season 3 at some point. I will continue to write reviews and other content. If there is to be any change it will be as a slight reduction in output.

I have said that 2 things a week was sustainable and that is still true, but that requirement has gotten in the way of other projects. For example, writing scripts for the YouTube series happens much earlier than their eventual release, and squeezing that writing in and around a regular article schedule got very difficult and stressful at points. Plus, trying to be creative under such conditions is difficult, and I feel it’s likely that either articles or videos could have been better if I had given them the space they deserve.

I’m currently planning on only guaranteeing 1 article a week, though I’m sure there will still be plenty of extra articles, I still have so many games I’m excited to write about. But I want to give myself the freedom to work on bigger things or have breaks when I need them. Relieve a bit of the pressure so I can really enjoy the work that I do!

Design?

A second or maybe third reason now (kind of losing track) goes back to my original motivation for starting this blog in the first place. I had started playing around with game design and wanted to create a platform from which I could possibly launch games of my own. As things worked out the blog became an all consuming end in and of itself, which is no bad thing, but it does mean I was never able to follow through with the actual game design. I occasionally dip back into it, but never with sufficient commitment, and the blog soon takes over.

So I wanted to make game design my focus for the next 3 months. To really push myself to figure out whether it is something I truly enjoy as a process. I’ve found it easy to say “I want to be a game designer” but… do I really? To at least start figuring that out, I need to test myself. And that requires some time and space and the place to make that is in the blog, which has so often blocked me in the past. As I said, there will still be content and reviews, just at a (possibly) slightly reduced frequency!

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So here is to another big and exciting year! Let me know if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them!