2017 End of Year Retrospective (Patreon)

2017 is coming to a close which means I’ve been working on Tabletop Audio for 4 years. I’ve done a few of these year end retrospectives now. I find they help me put things in perspective and motivate me to create new and better things in the new year.

Here’s a quick, back-of-the-envelope list of things we did together in 2017:

I created 24 new 10 minute ambience tracks and 2 new SoundPads, added text filtering and a keyword search to the homepage and title filtering to the Custom SoundPad.

Based on user feedback I made some other improvements to Custom SoundPad. Scenes are now saved in the ‘get link’ feature which allows true sharing of created content, and makes back-ups as simple as bookmarking a URL. Additionally, the behavior of the music tracks was modified so not only do they not play over each other,  but fade in and out gracefully.

With the help of programmer and Tabletop Audio supporter Jim Young, I released an Alexa skill so you can play Tabletop Audio ambiences on your Amazon Echo family of devices. And, while not really a site addition, I will add that I was awarded a Gold ENnie award for ‘best website’ at GenCon. Maybe one year they’ll invite me to be on a panel so I can go!

In an update that probably 5 of you noticed, I moved the entire site from http to https which makes everything more secure and - well, actually I got this somewhat scary email from Google that told me I really really needed to do it. Naturally, there was about a week where everything was breaking in strange ways but a few of you were super helpful in getting things worked out as I emailed you 20 times a day with subjects like: “is it working yet”, and “how about now” and “now??”. Thankfully, we got it all working.

According to Google Analytics the site served 2.8 million plays/downloads of the 10 minute ambiences. This doesn’t include SoundPad plays or the plays from roll20 (they host the tracks they use on their servers) or people who block Google Analytics (I’m not mad!). Still, that's an increase from the previous year and I'm pleased.

I added a late December request to the main page ambience player (I hadn’t touched this code in almost 3 years) so that individual tracks are now loopable, getting rid of the hack where you had to add the same track multiple times.

I also did some custom work, most of which I lobbied to be able to share with you all on the site. I created ambience tracks for escape rooms here in the U.S. and in the U.K. I also created over an hour of audio for Grant Howitt’s upcoming RPG called Spire:The City Must Fall, and several tracks for James Iles’ new RPG, Legacy: Life Among the ruins 2nd Edition. I’m looking forward to working on more games like this in the coming year.

Oh, and I made designs for t-shirts. Which some of you have kindly sent photos of you wearing! (my in-laws all got them for gifts, and yes, contrary to the images on the site, they do come in a variety of colors. My sister-in-law is rocking a fly pink one.

Personally 2017 was rough. Back in April I lost my father. Then over the course of the year I lost 2 uncles. It was a tough time, and as anyone who has ever lost a parent knows, coping with the myriad logistics of the remaining parent can be just as challenging as dealing with the grief of loss. I only add this because of how important it was for me to be able to focus on creating things and staying positive.

The end of the year had a bit of unwelcome excitement in the form of Patreon’s ill-advised new fee structure. Luckily, they heard the overwhelmingly negative reaction of the community and cancelled it. I, along with so many others, haven’t recovered completely from the loss of support this caused but am confident that it will come back eventually.

Most importantly, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for your continuing support of the site. I absolutely couldn’t do this without you. Have a happy and safe New Year!

Best,

Tim

TL:DR: 2017 is over, we did a lot of cool things together. I’m looking forward to doing more stuff in 2018. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.