Let me start by saying this blog is not meant to be a guide for people to follow to become a let's player, I mereley wanted to share my first few experiences.

A little more then a week ago, I made the decision. I was going to be a let's player for PC games. I had watched countless let's plays before and decided that I wanted to make one of my own. With my love of both video games and acting, I thought that this would be great fun to do. For those of you that don't know, a let's play is sort of similar to the endurance run's here at GB except generally it is done with one player. They play a game and make (usually humorous) comments along the way.

Well my journey began with trying to find the right equipment to use. A great place to go to for information on this sort of this is Voltron Army, a website essentially dedicated to let's plays. From there I learned I would need a recording device, a mic, and an encoding/editing device. For the recording device, I played around for a long time trying to find something good I could use that was free. The free ones were by no means bad, simply each had something I didn't like about them. They may have left a watermark on the videos, or not allow for audio. In the end I wound up buying the standard, FRAPS, as it was the best choice overall. Next I headed over to best buy and found a pretty nice headset and mic that is a little simialr to an Xbox live mic, but of much higher quality. Finally for Encoding I decided to buy the AVS video converter as again it was far superior to anything that was free. In the end, the total cost ended up being something along the lines of $100. Putting out quality video isn't cheap.

Next I needed a format to post my videos so I created a new username on youtube called JTtheletsplayer. Creative I know. With this ready to go I decided to test out everything and made a 12 minuite video from Oblivion in which I just messed around with this Argonian. It was great fun to produce. Afterwords I posted this on youtube and then on the Voltron Army Forums so that it could get a little traffic. This video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GnCgGqD37w&feature=channel_video_title

Immediatley after this I began my first true let's play. I wanted to do a game I knew I would enjoy, so I chose Dragon Age Origins. I cranked out a couple videos of that first and pretty quickly got three subscribers who all gave good feedback. My mic was a little to loud in the first six videos. After that though I was able to correct the mistake and the volume is much better. They also told me it would be a good idea to put the video into widescreen form so the screen could be larger. All these were great positive feedback.

And there's the thing. It feels so great every time someone posts a single comment. I'm not even sure why, maybe it's because I'm new. But everytime someone posts a comment on my videos, even if it's criticism, I smile. I now appreciate just how hard it is to be a new let's player, or youtuber in general.

I will continue to upload videos in this series as I'm already up to episode 10 and post about one or two videos a day. If you would like to join in on the series (which I would love) and provide any feedback you can, you can find me at http://www.youtube.com/user/JTtheletsplayer Thanks for reading :)