“Summoning” A Game For Ludum Dare 55

Promotional art for the hit game of the year

Here I am back again for my biyearly post. This past weekend I participated in another 72 hour game jam. I had a great time participating as a solo developer and while I produced a pretty simple and basic game, I think it stayed pretty close to the original on paper vision.

Before you read this, consider trying out my game first at this link before reading this article! It’s a short play and you can play it on any Windows machine in most compatible browsers! It supports keyboards and controllers! This article avoids spoiling a lot of the discovery and surprises it holds, but still can ruin a bit of the magic.

Last October, I competed in my first ever game jam with Ludum Dare 54. The theme for that one was “limited space” and if you want a little more detail on what it’s like to do your first game jam you can read about it in this blog post from last year. This time around I’m going to talk a bit more about the process and less about the concepts of what a game jam is, so if you’re confused on what this is even about, that might be the better post to read.

The number one goal from this jam was to force myself to learn a new engine – Godot 4.2. All of my previous game creation experience has been starting with a small attempt at learning GameMaker Studio followed by a longer stint with Unity. After Unity’s previous PR disasters and the feeling that it could become a sinking ship at any time, I made the decision to switch over to the open source alternative that seems to be gaining a lot of market share. My experience with Godot here was mostly positive. I went in to this jam only prepping for about a week and a half versus the last jam where I had six weeks prep and had some prior experience. Godot has it’s small quirks about it, but it seems to be headed in a very positive direction.

The other goal was to get experience with pixel art. I had never really done much with drawing at such a small scale and I ended up using the popular sprite creator program Aseprite for over 20 hours in this 72 hour period. If there is one spot that I may have underestimated, it would be the sheer amount of work it would take for an idea like this. I’ll get in to more of that a little later.

The idea for the game was created keeping my own inexperience in mind. I decided that I had to make the smallest concept I could come up with. It’s easier to scope for something small so you then have extra time where you can polish and expand instead of cutting things left and right and making a messy experience. My game idea was to make a singular mini-game, loosely something that resembled a game you would play in the WarioWare franchise.

The lore of the titular Party Wizard is that you are in the backroom of a house party filling peoples requests by summoning in the items they ask for. The guest asks for a specific item, you are given a timer and four options, and you must choose the right one to fill the request before time runs out. As the game progresses, the items tend to have higher odds of being goofier. You may start a game by giving someone a cookie and end by failing to deliver someone the katana they requested. Three wrong attempts, and you’re done. Each round the timer gets shorter and the game speeds up inevitably becoming too fast to handle.

What Went Right

The first thing I made for this project was the random generation of items. Each item was given a rarity value falling in to one of four categories (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Ultra Rare) to determine how often each item was chosen. The scripting for this was a quick write and just kind of worked immediately. It allowed me to change percentages in the editor and change them dynamically in the code. It helped make testing productivity much higher. Is the code efficient? Probably not. But it works to that’s a win for me.

Basic animation of the gameplay loop

One of the biggest issues with the last jam was I barely left any time for audio. This time it didn’t come together until the last day, but when it did it came together way quicker than I ever expected. I made some basic sound effects using the free Bosca Ceoil midi creation software and two versions of a thirty second track that was purposely made to be loud and abrasive. This allowed me to make two versions of the same song – one loud for the title screen and one muted and distorted to play in the background during gameplay. The faint muted bass made it feel like you were in a different room adjacent to a party and I think the effect came off pretty decent.

Keeping the project small was a big help. I ended up having a pretty decent prototype by the end of the first two days which left me the last twenty-four hours to polish which I believe make it much more cohesive. It gave me time to add extra animations, audio, more items for variety. It gave me time to add in systems to make the rarer items appear more often as the game progresses since I assumed as a jam game it would only be played for five minutes or less allowing people to see more of the content I made for it. It also let me add in some rare character spawns which are still fairly difficult to find. I only saw them twice in all of my testing.

My only goal in terms of rating was to make a game that was funnier than the one I made last jam. When the scores come in I just want a higher humor score. It’s all I really care about since I know it’s not the greatest game in the world. Only time will tell on that, but I think in all aspects, not just humor, it’s a better game than my previous jam.

What Went Wrong

An important part of learning from game jams is being able to distinguish what went wrong so you can learn and grow from it. The first mistake was trying to make the game in such a small resolution. The game ended up being roughly double the size of the NES resolution and I quickly learned that not making a game in 16:9 comes with a lot of difficulties. I’m not saying this is a full on regret and I might explore the idea again down the road, but I would have had an easier time exporting on a short time frame if I had just picked something different for a game jam environment.

Sprite sheet of the explosion effect that is just a bunch of random pixels spray painted on to a canvas

Having this be my first time working with creating sprites, my art style ended up being inconsistent and the styles didn’t all mesh. I thought some of them actually turned out looking fairly decent, but others had odd shadows and incorrect perspective. Some had dark borders, others had gray or no borders. I should have come up with one style at the beginning and set some basic rules. I did an alright job at sticking to one color palette (with a few exceptions) but if I started over this project I would set up a standard from the first thing I drew. It is clear that I am not an artist at heart. This is very much programmer art.

Another sprite sheet animation that plays when you lose a life

One thing I still haven’t figured out with game jams is how to pace a game properly. My games tend to be too easy at the start with a difficulty curve that escalates too quickly. The number one complaint from others and from myself on this game is that it starts off too slow. There’s not much incentive to play it more than once because of how slow the early game is. Making the game increase speed as it progressed helped tremendously, but ultimately it felt like a bandage on a bigger problem.

Finally, the most obvious weakness just came from unfamiliarity with all the software I was using. I made a pretty late decision to even join this jam after a four month break from programming. I was learning new software, a new programming language, reacclimating myself with coding, and teaching myself new art styles all at once. The jam helped force me to learn these skills in a rapid timeframe, but it definitely highlighted a lot of my weaknesses. The good part of all of this is I’ve become a master of referencing documentation.

The Scrapped

A tough thing about game jams is you always have more ideas than time. Now I get to highlight a few things that were planned for this game that got cut due to time constraint or priorities.

I wanted to play with the concept of a secret item in this game. Something that was the rarest of rare that most players would never even encounter and by choosing it would ultimately end the game. The rough idea was that someone would request the soul of the party wizard and if fulfilled would unlock a secret ending. Hopefully down the road I can use this in some form because I just think it’s really funny.

Part of the difficulty scaling was that I was going to have a mechanic where after a few rounds more people would fill the room having full on conversations. These conversations would also be in speech bubbles and overlap the characters dialogue making it harder to read the items being requested. Since this never even made it to a testing phase, I’m not sure if it would have worked but I think it would have made for a better game. While the implementation of it wouldn’t have taken too long, it would have required more art assets and more written dialogue that I just didn’t want to make the time for.

The last thing was I didn’t have time to decorate the room. It’s boring. That’s all. I just ran out of time on that one. Even like some cracks on the wall or something would have helped. The table looked nice at least.

So where do I go from here? Right now, I have to continue playing my peers games and submitting ratings so I can get a final placement in the jam. Seeing other peoples end results in jams like this always give me a mixture of emotions. It makes it too easy to make unfair comparisons sizing yourself up to games made by teams of professionals. It can also be incredibly inspiring seeing others creative visions come to life. It’s the examination of a vast quality of end products ranging from the broken prototypes to the impressive well designed games that will eventually become commercial release. It’s incredible how large these events are and how many people go through it. They should all be proud just for attempting. I’m hoping to just get a better score than my previous attempt. If not, it’s ok. I learned a lot and this was another positive experience.

I think before I jump in to another game jam, I want to make something a little larger in scale. I’m going to continue learning Godot and advancing my skillset. I want to get good enough at coding that maybe I can eventually feel worth enough to join a collaborative group on a jam. This is hard to do until I believe in my abilities and I have a long road ahead of me for that. I need to stop taking long breaks from programming and design because it feels like starting over each time I do one of these. As of right now, I feel fresh and rejuvenated more than burnt out which is always a good sign.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading a little about my journey. I like writing these as they help put a little bow on each project I do and hopefully you’ll see more in the future!

If you want to check out my previous work, you can check it out on my itch page.

Until next time!

Lessons in Game Jamming

Above is my video game, Clogged Tube, developed in 72 hours from scratch. You can play it here directly in your computer browser if you would like before reading this article

Game development as a hobby is a difficult pastime. It is a constantly moving industry with a million different specialties that you may never end up having any experience with, even if you dedicate your life to the craft. You can put yourself through months of challenging work just to come out with an end product that if you’re lucky maybe a dozen people will play. It really is an industry for the love of the game, no pun intended. It can be isolating and relentless, yet I absolutely adore it. It’s the ultimate creative exercise that requires you to wear many different hats. No shortage of challenges. A puzzle with many solutions.

This past week I got to knock off a lifetime goal of competing in a game jam. Ludum Dare even. One of the largest game jams in the world.

For those not familiar with the event, let me give you the cliff notes version of it. A game jam is a communal event where people from across the globe work to create video games from the ground up in an extremely short amount of time to test their skills and get feedback from a panel, or in this case, their peers. These games are made to fit a set theme which is revealed at the very first moments of the event. In the case of Ludum Dare, there are three versions of this jam – the “compo”, which is a 48 hour solo jam with strict rules; the “jam”, which is their traditional 72 hour jam which can be done solo or in groups; or the “extra”, which is a newly added version with a three week time frame for those who can’t dedicate an entire weekend. As a very beginner level entrant, I went with the recommended 72 hour version as the new “extra” category means you do not get the same quality feedback as the others since it extends to the end of the voting period.

In game design, everything tends to have long timeframes and because of that lengthy projects often end up abandoned and less experimental since we tend to put more effort into the creation of ideas that are safer. Game jams lean towards a more abstract approach of game design as creators try out new ideas or technology and it forces them to keep features minimal, which we refer to as a small scope project. Game jams force the participants to figure out what is important and trim every imaginable piece of fat from the meat. Innovation comes out of necessity.

I went in to the jam with the intention of just having a solid attempt at creating anything. I started six weeks before the jam with a weekly plan to get myself reacquainted with the software I would need as I had been out of practice for around half of a year. This plan was uprooted in so many ways and by the time the start date hit I was not very prepared. For this game jam, I would mostly be winging it. In the case of Ludum Dare 54, the theme was “limited space.” This seemed like a great theme for my first attempt at surviving a game jam. With a theme like “limited space” there would be a ton of options and angles to attack it from to come up with an idea that was original enough to hopefully not be covered by someone else’s entry.

I spent the first hour brainstorming on small ideas that I thought I would be able to handle. The goal was to come up with a game concept that was extremely simple and small and then use any extra time I had to add on new features in modules. I had done my research and read many recommendations that modular design is a great way to survive game jams. It sets you up for success by increasing the odds that you finish a basic gameplay loop and have a working game to showcase in the end. The more time you have afterwards, the more “modules” you add to the idea, and in theory the more impressive it becomes.

The concept I ended up choosing seemed simple enough in my head. For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind when I thought of limited space was a crowded subway car. Kind of weird, but felt original enough that not many other people would attempt it. The game idea was a grid based endless game where you must simply exist on a subway as more and more people enter the car. Avoiding all contact with them was the core and I decided to give the player three “lives” or as they were simply referred to as “pardons”. A pardon would be used when the player made contact with any other player on the subway. A comedic version of the ultimate test in social anxiety. Just trying to survive in the world without getting in the way of others. The game was given an awkward art style (unintentionally reminiscent of South Park) and was built around some systems that also did not end up in the final version.

My character wandering around the subway while some student with a backpack combos me for getting too close to him

There are probably endless things that I could discuss on how the project evolved, which parts of it worked, which parts of it flopped, the issues I knew at release, the issues I found out about through user feedback – but instead of breaking down every little thing I will try to just talk about what I learned. If anyone ever has a serious interest in this kind of thing beyond what I cover here, I love talking about it and if you have any questions I am always open to discuss any of it directly.

Lets start out by talking about some of the things that went right in this game jam.

#1 – Modular creation is key

The best advice I read before starting this jam was to pick an idea that is incredibly small and then add on to it after the core is complete. I created checklists to do this and ordered them based on what I felt was the most important to the theme and then added more features afterwards when I felt like the base was where it needed to be. For this project, things came together at the last minute. They likely would have fallen apart with how tight the time ended up being if I had put a bunch of work in to unnecessary features earlier on in the weekend.

#2 – Let others create their own opinions

With the last game I had a hard time getting feedback after release and I think mostly that was because I didn’t like the game myself. On release, I was very negative and apologetic about it most places I had shared it and I quickly learned that gives off an impression that you don’t want to hear more negativity. It’s hard enough getting quality feedback to begin with because people think you just want reinforcement of what worked. It’s very challenging to tell other people what needs to be fixed and why things don’t work. By letting people create their own opinions instead of painting it for them, they tend to be more comfortable telling you why they do not like certain aspects.

#3 – Listen to problems, rarely solutions

This rolls in from the last reasoning but a while back I had heard a piece of advice about how in criticism you should always listen to people’s problems but rarely listen to their solutions for them. This interested me because it really seemed backwards, but in practice it all makes sense to me now. The biggest piece of feedback I received on this game from other developers was that the game is too difficult to control. My game featured a control scheme where you used the left and right arrow keys to rotate and used the up button to step forward, a control scheme that in the video game industry is typically referred to as “tank controls.” I am still adamant that the game concept only works when it has clunky controls and a more traditional scheme would have made it not only more generic but also far too easy and responsive. This feedback is still extremely helpful because it lets me know why some people didn’t connect with the game and provided a barrier for them to have an enjoyable experience. Acknowledging this problem down the road is helpful and allows me to reassess these decisions in future games, but listening to the provided solution of just moving the character around in a traditional way I believe would not have made this the better experience they think it would.

#4 – Be ruthless with cutting content

This rule is the absolute hardest one to abide by but you have to be able to cut content that feels important along the way. Another piece of advice I read online before I started this jam was to make a checklist and cut it in half by the end of night one. After night two, reassess the remaining items on the list and cut it in half again. I didn’t follow this advice to the tee, but I did use a version of it and it worked to great success. I had to cut a lot of features that would have made this game stand out more, and it was unfortunate but a necessity. The original pitch had all characters moving rhythmically with unique midi instruments attached to them to make an urban themed cacophony, but this idea was quickly cut as time started ticking away. In fact, this idea was so core to the original pitch that it’s why the game was based on a grid to begin with. The project had to evolve to get finished. Lots of other smaller things like a working seat system and a bunch of different rider types also had to get cut along the way. Aesthetic things like a logo and a main menu also never got completed. Tough decisions had to be made, but without making them the game would not have been finished on time and would currently be sitting in an abandoned folder somewhere.

#5 – Have fun with it

Image of the rare “Stanta” character that spawns roughly once every 63 games

This seems like obvious advice but I had to keep reminding myself when things got tough that I’m just here for the fun of it and if I’m not enjoying what I’m doing it’s simply not worth it. There were moments when this project came very close to having the towel thrown in on it. I’m sure the next section will cover that in more detail, however the times I enjoyed this project the most was when I was just riffing off the top of my head. The voice lines were all improvised, for the art I gave myself one hour to just draw characters for a while and most of them made it in to the game. There is even an extremely rare character that has a one in one thousand chance of replacing any of the non playing characters in the game. Putting in little Easter eggs and just being goofy with it at times helped to keep me sane.

Now for the inverse, here are the some of the lessons I learned.

#1 – When things fall apart, take a mental break

To build off the positive section, on day two this project almost collapsed. I had written a collision system that was just extremely broken. Characters were constantly getting launched out of bounds. Animations were broken and characters were walking through closed doors. I had a bug list that was over a dozen items long and they were all linked to a concept that just wasn’t working. I stepped away without intending to come back. About an hour later, I returned and just started doodling. Once graphics began coming together and I had distracted myself from the problem, I came up with a new solution. Spend the rest of the night just getting all the art in place, getting a minimal amount of sleep, and then returning to the project to add audio and give myself one chance to gut the entire collision system and rewrite it from the ground up. Without this break and subsequent regrouping of the project, it would have been abandoned at around the 48 hour mark. I would say this was a win on this project, but it was so close to a fail that I definitely learned a new lesson that day.

#2 – Get feature ready 24 hours before the goal

You know when this project was due? 5PM on Monday. You know when I finished typing code? 4:59PM on Monday. Not only did I work for probably 18 hours of the final 24, but I took a huge risk and released this game with code that was tested for approximately 10 minutes. The final two hours I spent implementing a major feature that was crucial to the success of the game. Why did I wait this long to code the feature if it was so important? Because of the issues discussed in the previous point. Everything snowballs and I learned that I cannot leave important features that long in to the process. Get everything essential done early on. It helps you polish and seek out bug fixes in the final hours.

#3 – Get the full package together early on

A side by side comparison of first prototype version of the game and the final release version

Nothing will keep you less motivated than staring at prototype graphics for the majority of the project. Having nice looking visuals and audio makes the goal feel more achievable. It’s easy to leave these features until the end because they don’t always feel like the priority, but really they are a big part of what makes the game unique. Real graphics always line up better than prototype squares and circles anyway. Just get it done and commit. You need to eventually anyway.

#4 – Have a few testers on standby and involved as early as possible

To build on the last two points, getting a build done earlier helps to get it in peoples hands sooner so you can get in feedback that you can use to fix the problems. If you wait too long to get feedback, there isn’t enough time to implement all the fixes and upgrades that will make your game stand out. While I was able to fix a number of bugs in this game due to the hard work of friends, it could have been so much more if I had gotten to that final draft portion much earlier. No one besides me laid hands on my game until the final 24 hours and it should have been maybe a day sooner.

#5 – Comment. Your. Code.

Most people are smarter than me on this one but I am absolutely terrible at commenting my own code. Spending an extra 15 seconds to just add in a little comment about what a line of code does will save you so much time in the later stages – especially in the case of a jam where I was having to take some unconventional approaches to make sure things worked. There wasn’t always time for the cleanest of code and I would probably be embarrassed to show my raw code on this project to anyone that knew what it meant. My code for this project contains zero comments. It’s a really bad habit and I’m going to work on kicking it.

In the end, I was not overly proud of the end product but I do think this is the best thing I have ever created. As long as I’m improving a little bit each time, I am happy. The fact that this game functions better than my last game release and was made in the smallest fraction of time is impressive. I am extremely content with how this experience went and I feel like I tested myself and passed. I still do not feel like I know very much, but that’s alright. Learning a bit with each release is a step in the right direction. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over the impostor syndrome of feeling like I do not belong when I’m surrounded by people who have done this work for years, decades, or an entire lifetime, but really projects like this aren’t about comparing yourself to others, they’re about creating something unique to you to the best of your ability. In those regards, I call this a success.

The next part of the jam is still ongoing but following the release of the game you are volunteering yourself to rate the games created by others. In the case of this Ludum Dare, there were over 2000 entries and tons of games to play. They’re made by people of all skill levels and talents. For each game you rate, the algorithm helps to push your game out to more people. In short, for each thing you review, in theory, someone else will review yours. The goal is to rate somewhere between 20-50 different games over the course of the three weeks following the jam and provide feedback and others will do it to you in return. It’s a complex system that works surprisingly well. Games are ranked on a 5 star scale in a variety of categories and at the end of the jam all games that have twenty or more reviews are given scores and rankings. While all the entries are available for free to the public, only other participants are eligible to rate games.

Example of what the current Ludum Date ratings system looks like

I took the time to play as many games as I could and have already received enough ratings to be eligible for scores in the coming weeks. While I do not particularly care about the rankings, I am interested to see where the numbers come out for specific categories to get an idea on where I can improve in terms of my creations. I have already been reading the comments left on my game and they have provided valuable insight in to what issues people see the most. Even though a lot of the issues I had known about previously, the frequency at which people mentioned certain ones is helping me see what problems are mattering most to the user. Some of my biggest gripes with the game have not been mentioned in a single comment thus far which is why feedback is so important. I spent so much time on a fundamental level with this game that some of the problems I see, especially since I created them, bother me while no one else even notices them.

If you’ve read through this and you are an aspiring game creator and you are wondering if you should try doing a jam I would personally say go for it. Even if you don’t succeed, you’ll learn a lot about the process and yourself along the way. If the time span seems much too short, there are literally hundreds of game jams out there every single month all with very different time tables. You can easily submit your game to a small group of people instead of putting yourself out there in front of 2000+ teams. I have also heard good things about the Global Game Jam which is the world’s largest jam and is created to put you in to a team and make games with others. This jam encourages people with zero experience to apply and the idea for newcomers is for them be teamed up with people much more experienced in a mentor type role.

At the end of 72 hours, I felt like I had gone through a war. I was exhausted and passed out within hours. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I want to do it again. I don’t know if I’ll participate in the next Ludum Dare or if I’ll choose something completely different, but I would like to keep doing these and trying to find out more about my design style along the way. In the meantime, I am going to spend the rest of the year trying out some new engines (starting with Godot) and fleshing out some of the ideas I have for my next larger scale project. I came out of this game jam feeling rejuvenated and chomping at the bit to create again which is more than I can say about last time I finished a project and came out the other end feeling nothing but defeat.

When I started doing game development as a hobby, my two goals were to release a game and to compete in a game jam. Now that both of these have been accomplished, I have decided to keep continuing this journey with two new goals in mind. The first goal is to create something I’m proud of. I want to make something that really connects with me and that I feel more comfortable sharing with others. I do think I’m already getting close to accomplishing this. The second goal is I want to get confident enough in my programming that I can work in a team with others. I know that art is my single biggest weakness at the current moment and I hope someday I can get paired up with an artist because nothing hides the programming flaws better than a nice art direction.

As the journey continues, I’ll keep writing these blog posts. They’re a nice bow tied on top of a completed goal and help me to sum up what I went through to get to this point. Thanks for reading these and joining me along the way.

The Story of “Satan’s Shakers”

Satan’s Shakers. A video game.

It’s 9:26 PM on August 10th, 2022 and I’m sitting here in the dark on my laptop with one goal in mind – to explain to you all what the experience was like creating my first video game. It’s actually pretty difficult to do. The journey has been long, at times unconventional, and trying to condense the event in one article seems like an impossible task. I’ve learned that using these posts to put a pin in the end of a project and sum up a large picture experience tends to be cathartic so I’m going to do my best.

Before I start, if you have not played the game and have any inkling to, now is the time. It’s a free download and can even be played inside a browser window on a computer. You can even click here to go to that website! Wow! I’ll be talking about the process a lot here which will give away all the little tidbits of the game. If you don’t really mind spoiling the experience or have already played it, read on.

For anyone that isn’t familiar, for approximately the past year I’ve been trying to teach myself programming with the goal of creating a video game. I wanted to do every aspect of development and really learn what it is like to take on an entire project solo. I made a post about 6 months ago regarding the first game I attempted to make which fell apart about a month later. I may cover similar ground talking about this project seeing as I didn’t reread it before writing this, but if you want to see what that experience was like it should be the last post on this rarely used blog.

A behind the scenes look at my last project: Microprocessing that was quickly abandoned after a month of development.

I spent nearly all of the back half of 2021 doing a variety of Unity tutorials and some other adjacent software to familiarize myself with what I would need to do to achieve my goal of making a game by the end of 2022. At the beginning of this year, I began development on Microprocessing, a game that was a bit overly ambitious and ended up throwing in the towel when I saw the incredible scope combined with my inexperience. It just wasn’t going to work out.

About a week or two before the abandonment of that project, I had a small idea for a game. I spent many lunch breaks at work just physically writing out a plan which would manifest into the game I am looking to release in the coming weeks – Satan’s Shakers.

The thought process behind this project was to take a small known game with simple and defined rules and recreate it while putting my own spin on it. I tend to get a lot of small ideas for video games and occasionally I log them in a notebook for future use. I have the memory of a goldfish so writing down things is a big help to me. It’s actually pretty amusing looking back on some of these ideas and having zero recollection of ever writing them down. I’d imagine this is what creative people feel when they have a vivid dream of an idea and write it in a journal on their nightstand and try to decipher it in the morning. Some of these ideas are terrible and others are ones I can work with.

A few pages from my design notebook breaking down some storyboarding and gameplay ideas.

The goal of this game was simple – I would recreate a board game that many people have played and know the simple ruleset of. I chose the popular dice game Yahtzee as my starting point. It seemed fairly easy to work with. After the last project, I had been wanting to do some sort of narrative on a smaller scale. I just happened to be listening to Tenacious D’s song “Tribute” the week prior and somehow got in my head the absurd idea that what if The Devil played some trivial game with you in order to save yourself from eternal damnation. It wasn’t exactly a great idea but something I could work with.

From there, I decided to storyboard a short introduction cutscene and wrote a weird rhyming poem of a script and sketched out the scenes over the course of about an hour – much of this ended up being beat for beat what ended up in the final game. After that, I mapped out what the game would look like and some basic notes on how things would control. I listed out many possible features, some of which ended up in the game while many didn’t. I really enjoyed this process of physically writing things out in a notebook and it’s something you can hold on to down the line as a memento of the experience. I will hopefully continue to do this with my next project.

My game was now almost fully laid out in a relatively short amount of time. At this point I decided this could be a viable option for my next project and it was all wrapping up as I decided to cancel the other game I had been working on. Before I committed to this idea fully, I decided to start prototyping some of the harder features to make sure this would be a project I could handle.

Call me insane, but I had the awful idea to use three dimensional dice. Up until this point, nearly every Unity tutorial course I had completed was based around 2D design and I had almost no experience in 3D. The game was going to be a mixture of 2D and 3D which ended up heavily complicating the development and may have made the end product much worse. I designed a simple basic dice in Blender, a 3D modeling program, and drew out a texture to apply to it (a process that took me many hours due to my extreme unfamiliarity). I also modeled a basic bin for the dice to roll in to and a cup for the dice to exit and I started scripting the game.

I made a script that would generate an adjustable number of dice and roll them into the bin. After some trial and error, everything seemed to be working. This was my first passed test. As a student, I was always terrible at both science and math – something the average computer enthusiast seems to strive at – so getting the physics all figured out was one of my biggest worries. Things mostly worked and some of the quirks remain in the game today. You may notice how dice sometimes land on their edges or how the physics seem to almost reverse when they hit hidden walls. It is not my finest work. These 3D physics are the thing I am the least proud of when it comes to this game release. Recreating real world concepts in a simulation can be extremely difficult even when the software is doing the heavy lifting for you. I still believe there seems to be a bias to how the dice roll even though the script is 100% random in rotation when the dice are generated. It’s really easy to get a large straight in one roll.

The other concept I was worried about was the ability to create artificial intelligence that could play a game. This is something I had absolutely zero experience with and would have to commit a lot more time to a prototype before I could even attempt to make a computer that could make decisions. I spent probably a month of development getting to that point. All the other pieces seemed to slide together. I would make lists of items to check off and halfway through that list it would be longer than when I started. Programming for me is a constant stream of checklists that never seem to end. I would think I was being thorough and I’d end up finding so many more things that needed to get done. It’s easy to see why projects take much longer than anticipated if the creator isn’t experienced with project management.

Just a small excerpt from my 14 page Google doc that is almost exclusively checklists.

I tried my best to code anything I might possibly need in the program as I went. There are actually a slew of features under the hood that were never even used. I made an entire animation system for the story that I decided not to use because it would require more art and quite frankly I am no artist. If you’ve played or seen the game at all, this should be clear. Every intro scene of story has the ability to have looping backgrounds and three tiers of animation. I ended up just putting still images in there to save on time and assets.

Early unused test animation with a real early art style that got replaced in game.

I also coded the ability for dice to have as many sides as I wanted. The twist of this game was that Shakers was a game Satan invented and therefore he could change the rules to his advantage whenever he wanted. One of the original ideas was that Satan could give himself a D20 which would allow for some interesting combinations and help boost his score. Unfortunately, putting in the math here made the game wildly unpredictable and I ended up scrapping the plans. The game is already unpredictable and at times unfair and I thought adding this dice in to the game would be even more trouble giving the opponent absurd amounts of points.

On top of these features, the game has many other things coded in to it such as a hidden feats list which grants bonus points for completing mystery objectives and the ability to roll as many dice as possible. If you wanted to play this game with 100 dice, it’s coded in to the game. It wouldn’t be balanced in the slightest, but it would work. I made my code scalable because it’s good practice and also because it would let me mess around with the rules as I went. If there’s one thing I learned from Unity tutorials it’s that sometimes playing with the extremes is a good way to find new features in game design.

An early stress test of extreme amounts of dice.

The problem with having a robust engine was that my code began to become unorganized. Even though I thought I had learned the lesson of commenting my code on the previous project, I barely commented anything early on. This lead to methods and lines of code that jumped from one script to another and would prove to be near impossible to follow. This wasn’t a huge problem with things I was actively working on, but any code I returned back to months later ended up requiring tens of minutes, if not hours, to parse. I will never let anyone see some of the raw code of this project because it is quite embarrassing.

Eventually, I hit the previously mentioned road block – coding the computer turns. I didn’t really know how to go about this so I decided to just take a blank document and map out how I would play a game of Yahtzee and make a flow chart of sorts. I made a list of what I felt order of importance was, compared it to a list of dice values, and had the computer choose based on the strongest moves available. Because of this, the computer sometimes makes incredibly aggressive moves. In a few applicable places, I would let a coin flip decide between some same strength moves to add a bit of randomness to the logic. This was one of the hardest parts of coding this game and all things considered I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The computer doesn’t always make the same moves I would, but 95% of the time it seems to make fairly logic choices.

Organization is one of the biggest things I can work on. Scripts with repetitive names and a lack of commenting in the code made late project development much more difficult.

There were other parts that I struggled with, but I won’t bore you with all the specific details. I had big issues with mixing 2D and 3D elements, problems with cameras lining up and supporting different resolutions, problems with audio compression making my music sound more metallic than intended, problems with art assets – just to name a few. I had to come up with a lot of creative solutions and I think that’s why I, at times, enjoy programming. It’s problem solving without any specific rules. Take ten different people trying to solve the same problem and you might get ten viable solutions. It’s an open ended application of creativity. I tried my best to make it through this entire project coding everything myself and, minus a few lines of code where I just hit a wall I couldn’t break through, everything here is written by me from scratch. It might not be the most efficient code, but it works and I’m really proud of accomplishing the end goal.

Every time I would hit a road block with programming, I would feel discouraged and for months of this project I absolutely despised game creation. Finishing this game was a major mental hurdle. Combined with some moments of deteriorating mental health, this project which should have taken 2-3 months ended up taking over half a year. The end product does not reflect the time invested at all. As my first game, I expected it to take much longer than a seasoned person would need, but this still took an incredibly long time to make even on that scale.

Once I got near the finish line of this game, I started to feel a second wind. I went from doing 15-30 minutes of coding per day to hours each day. One weekend I even put in nearly 16 hours like it was my job. I actually am back to the point where I enjoy programming again. Opening up my game to others and getting feedback has felt really good. I was afraid to share the game for a long time but once I ripped off that bandage it made the game better because it allows me to see the things I have been missing all this time. I am not afraid of feedback because I want to be better at this. If you played my game and have negative things to say, that’s ok. Tell me all of your issues. In excruciating detail even. As long as it’s constructive, I can put it to work in the future.

This camera transition became the bane of my existence and made the rest of the project more difficult. Inexperience and poor planning can really bring down productivity.

There are many little features that only I will ever notice in my game and that’s another fun part of development. I programmed in a reaction system that randomizes dialogue based on a few scenarios. The Devil in this game actually has 78 different lines of dialogue. The average person will only see 13 of those. Did I need to write so much? Probably not. Every feature like this I added were to make the experience more fun for me. I think I learned my lesson that sometimes adding in too much random content actually can water down the experience. A handful of well crafted dialogue lines may have made for a better game.

Satan’s Shakers is a game that went through an overly long development cycle and didn’t quite meet my expectations. In my eyes, it’s a bland puzzle game that had most of it’s originality stripped out of it as features were cut along the way. I have zero regrets making it and I’m really proud of seeing it to the end, but as a perfectionist I do not take much pride in the game itself. Hopefully some people find some sort of enjoyment out of it, but I know I am capable of much better, which is why I plan to take on another project after this one.

My next game is still in it’s early stages of planning, but I am going to do my best to take the lessons I learned here and apply them to it. I am actually very optimistic about doing this all over again and really hope I can create something I’m proud of. This time around, I’m going to put less pressure on myself. I was logging daily progress on social media and making sure I was doing something daily and while consistency is great, everyone needs to take a step back from time to time to see the full picture. I’m not perfect. Debatably, I’m not very good at this either, but everyone has to start somewhere.

It is 11:06 PM now on August 10, 2022 and I am just weeks away from releasing my first game. Everything I’ve written here is probably a jumbled mess, but I needed to get my thoughts out of my brain and on to paper. This will be edited and posted shortly after the game releases and hopefully that all went smoothly. Only time will tell.

I hope you all continue along this journey with me and I thank you for playing the game and reading this post. It’s more for me than you, but I still appreciate the company. Now I can end this article with something I actually accomplished.

-James Morgan
Game Developer
braktheman.itch.io

The Story of “Microprocessing”

As some of you may know, I have been spending the past half year or so learning the basics of game development. As a lifelong gamer, game design has always been something that interested me and I wanted to submerge myself in all aspects of game development just to get a better idea of how everything works. The ultimate goal is to create a full working game, no matter how small, by the end of 2022. It’s a lofty goal, but one I fully intend to hit.

I spent the final four months of 2021 doing tutorials daily and learning the ins and outs of Unity, a popular and powerful game engine that just happens to have a free version for those getting started. I quickly learned a lot of basics and started to get some fundamentals engrained on how to make a video game. I could almost call myself competent on a very beginner level.

As a 36 year old that has been long out of school, learning any skill is incredibly difficult. A lot of repetition and practice is required for me to maintain any knowledge, but I did my best to power through. By the time four months had passed, I was absolutely sick of tutorials and ready to move on to trying to create my own thing. I went in to my first project knowing that failure was not only possible but probable. I did the research to try to learn where people go wrong and better prepare myself to succeed. I went in with the knowledge, but still ended up making a ton of rookie mistakes. This article is here to document a bit about this first project attempt.

For years, I had kept a notebook of game ideas just in case some day I wanted to do something just like this. I chose a project I felt was pretty basic and not my best idea because I knew my first project would end up being pretty amateur and rough. What spawned out of that idea was an entirely different idea than I had set out to create.

The original idea was pretty simple. A clicker game. For those not in tune with the clicker game world, this is a concept that basically wraps around clicking on things, getting “currency” of some variety, and then buying upgrades that make the clicking happen faster and more automated. It’s a game that over time plays itself and is all about watching numbers increase. A ton of games use this formula on a fundamental level and it seemed like an easy thing to create. I’m not one to just copy ideas, so I felt like it needed my own spin on it.

This was the first mistake – trying to go for something a bit larger.

I wanted a game that revolved around a Windows 98-esque operating system from back in the days where downloading a file on Limewire was like a weird game of Russian Roulette where you might just end up with a nice little virus. What about a game that encouraged you to just infect your computer as much as possible – clicking on endless popup ads and installing viruses to beat a constantly evolving antivirus system. Not only is it a hard concept to follow, it was also a hard one to really pinpoint a structure for. While the original concept had a bit more to it, this was the heart of it. I’m only going to explain this much because it really isn’t important and the game I actually ended up making wasn’t even this. In order to get to that point, I needed to create a fake OS and that’s really what this story is about.

For the past month, I have been creating a shell of an operating system. Of course, this wasn’t a real operating system – it was just the smoke and mirrors version of one – the kind that makes video game development exciting. You don’t actually need to make the operating system, you just have to make enough that you can pretend to have made an operating system. I decided to make a new game concept around this, which I gave the name Microproccessing, that was narrative based. A kid freshly off to college gets their first computer, but everything ends up being a bit of a scam. Their brand new computer is loaded with a barebones trial version of an operating system that just constantly wants to be upgraded in order to see “full functionality”. A lot of the concept was based around my high school years – the idea of being new to the Internet and spending your time trading files with friends. I won’t go in to the whole narrative because I did actually storyboard a pretty large story and I may pull parts of it for other projects in the future, but the core of it was you would get emails from an old friend sending you little games he was making on his super powered top of the line computer. The gameplay would eventually build up to installing a virus which would then segue in to the actual game idea. It was a bit of a prequel demo.

This game idea was a way for me to make a bunch of small microgames while making the actual operating system core. This idea would accomplish three things – it would let me play around with a lot of small ideas, it was a narrative excuse for my absolutely terrible artwork that I was churning out, and it let me try to tell a story from start to finish – something I don’t know if I’ve ever actually attempted to do as an adult.

Initially, things went fairly well. It was easy to make a mockup of an operating system with primitive shapes and just kind of lay things out.

Nothing here was too fancy, just the basics being laid out – some nonfunctioning audio buttons for muting and volume control, a few white boxes to represent icons, a quickly drawn wallpaper, a launcher menu that opened on a click. The only new concept to me here was pulling in the time from my system clock which oddly enough serves as a good timestamp for all of the images you’ll see here. As a beginner, this project took me a long time to progress through (working on it for a few hours most days) because it took me many tries on a bunch of things to just get them functional.

While I have almost daily gifs showing the progress, I’ll just highlight a few here because some of the daily advancements are pretty boring.

Here is one from day 9 – it’s showing off a few different things. I had made working icons that linked to task bar icons. I had created an animal theme to the OS – something I thought would be easy to show the differences in different versions. SlothOS was this which was the basic entry level of operating systems from a company called Fauna Software and CheetahOS was their top of the line model. Yes, in retrospect I’m starting to realize this is all pretty cheesy. At this point, I also had opening and closing windows, a filler installer bar – actually a lot going on because of how early in the project this was.

By the end of the second week, I had gone as far as to have more task bar functionality, moving windows, and proper overlapping for active windows. Little did I know there were still major bugs that were found right after this. The UI elements, specifically the slider bars of the settings menu, were constantly proving to be the bane of my existence. They always wanted to be in the front no matter where certain windows were. I absolutely hate canvases and text functionality in Unity and while I have learned to deal with them, I still don’t have a full understanding of them.

This gif specifically shows the weird things that were happening frequently before I solved some major bugs. A lot of issues are solved by using the Z axis instead of relying on sorting groups and drawing layers. Even though it is a 2D game, this shows a little bit better how that works.

Seeing 3D representations of 2D games really can show you a lot about the tricks of game development. This stuff can be pretty annoying to someone trying to learn the craft, but it’s also extremely fascinating. It never gets old hearing the stories of how certain things in the video games you love actually work.

By the end of the third week, things were starting to feel a bit nicer. I made a whole drag and drop system with icons that locked them on to a grid and made sure they couldn’t overlap with each other. There’s a lot of hidden details at work here including different levels of highlighting, a physical grid that appears on dragging, and an overly complicated system of tags that makes sure things don’t mess up. Remember this concept of tags because we will be talking about it later on.

At this point, I had working installers that would add icons to a start menu. I even made a new wallpaper and had the settings menu let you select between them.

A trash system was one of my first hiccups and I actually ended up just making a weird thought bubble system because I was struggling so much to make a traditional feeling trash can. Dragging icons across the desktop was one thing, but dragging them to and from an active window was just not working whatsoever. The temporary error message was part of the narrative, but also a way to prevent icons from being deleted forever.

Oddly enough, I think the most fun I had with this project was making this tiny little install bar feel like an actual installer. I wanted to fully randomize it, but I couldn’t quite figure it out so instead I did a bit of trickery. I made five different install animations that would be chosen at random and then made a variable that determined the speed at which the bar would fill. Nothing too complicated, but really fun to create for some reason.

Once the OS was mostly complete, I started making some little games – this one was a Rock Paper Scissors game that would speed up with each round. I never got around to balancing it, but it was actually pretty fun to play and would get really challenging and become a bit of a reflex game. The best part of it all was, even though it was simplistic, I completed it in probably 48 hours.

There’s a ton of functionality that works in this project that I won’t cover here, but I’m for the most part happy with the work that I got done. Once I started working on the core app, the email client, the game really started falling apart. The biggest issues ended up being the actual code this was running on – it was getting messy and heavily relied on using Unity’s tag system which I’m quickly learning that string references are a good way to get in to trouble fast.

I ended up spending days just trying to figure out my code as the project got bigger – for every problem I fixed, two more would spring up in their place. The project was growing to a size that I was struggling to keep up with which is the core of why this project failed – scope.

I was actually worried about scope from day one, but I somehow convinced myself that this project would be pretty easy. I have now learned that trying to replicate something that people use on a daily basis is a good way to get in to trouble fast. Expectations of the way an operating system should feel are hard to hide when they just don’t feel right.

My system had no way to maximize windows because I just didn’t have the technical abilities to get it to work.

My system had a lot of bugs that had to do with double clicking because, well, teaching a computer what a double click is can be surprisingly difficult.

My system required tons of extra scripts and colliders to tell when a program was active and when a program was no longer active. Every click had to be processed by whatever was actually being clicked and because I did not (and honestly still don’t) understand how raycasting works, this was more trouble than it should have been.

There surely was a better way to handle a lot of these problems, but as a beginner programmer I got quickly lost in the weeds and couldn’t find my way out. What this really boiled down to was that I was constantly feeling frustrated when things didn’t work and for every solution I would look up they’d be full of high level technical speak that I was not following. The hardest thing about learning programming isn’t something that just comes with practice – you have to know WHAT you are practicing too. I could do things the wrong way for years and unless something tells me the better solution I will never figure it out on my own. This kind of learning comes from experimenting and trying new things.

I began this project trying to have fun and learn a new skill and once it became overbearing and frustrating, I decided to take a step back from it. This is not me giving up on programming, this is me taking what I’ve learned from this project and applying it to a new, smaller project. If that one fails, you’ll see a similar article – but this one is a much smaller scope that I already have storyboarded and mapped out in full. I begin development on it this weekend and I am very excited to see what becomes of it.

I’m going to release a game by the end of 2022 and hopefully it’s something you can all play and enjoy.

The key takeaways from this botched experiment that I will be using in my next game:

• A fully fledged and planned out concept from start to finish.
• Force myself to comment out more of my code so I don’t get as lost.
• Refactoring code along the way to make it easier to read and remove components that are no longer needed.
• A small project with a scope that doesn’t grow until the original concept is finished.
• Figuring out an art style that works for me and I am happy with.
• Not being afraid to experiment and then reverting if things don’t work out.

Hopefully next time you hear from me I’ll either be releasing this game or moving on to the next concept. Thanks for taking this journey with me.

If you’re interested in more regular updates, I post daily on http://www.twitter.com/brakthedev.

One Man’s Quest to Conquer the Nintendo 64 Library

Throughout life, I have always been a gamer. It’s just been part of my identity, for better or worse. The framework of the majority of friendships and life endeavors I have formed since birth. Growing up on a PC, I quickly learned about the huge variety of games out there in the world. Eventually, that turned in to console gaming with the Sega Genesis. I was always enthralled by the storytelling, creativity, and excitement video games could offer. While I was already fully invested in the world of video games, all of that would reach its pinnacle on Christmas Eve, 1996.

Enter the Nintendo 64. Man’s greatest invention. One of the most interesting video game consoles ever to be released.

From day one, I was absolutely sucked in to the possibilities of a 3D console with Super Mario 64. As time moved on, I would rent every game I could get my hands on. Trying out a variety of games kept things exciting. From the absolute best games to the absolute worst, the Nintendo 64 had a little of everything.

Even after I had moved on to the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, I continued keeping up with the console over the years. I purchased many video games from thrift stores and second hand stores amassing a small collection of all these games I had played over the years. A few decades later, I had hit nearly half of the entire library.

Much like most of my questionable ideas, it all started with one tweet.

Someone talk me out of my dumb idea to play through all the N64 games in chronological order— braktheman (@braktheman) July 9, 2019

A bit of a joke, but also with some hidden desires in it.

An excuse for a new project. An excuse to continue working towards that ultimate goal – the goal to own every single licensed game released for a console.

For some context, I had done some video game livestreaming on uStream and then eventually Twitch on and off since the early 2010s. From speedrunning to variety gaming, I had tested out the waters on all of it. As an introvert, Twitch provided just the right level of social interaction and feedback that I desired. Broadcasting to a relatively small audience and getting instantaneous feedback. A chance for me to be on when I wanted to and off when I didn’t. In 2019, I hadn’t done much streaming in the past 5 years. I’d come back for a few months and then disappear for a few years. Sticking with projects was never something I was exactly great at. I was ready to give it another shot and be a bit more serious about it this time than I had been in the past.

The idea was perfect – a combination of both worlds. I would finish my lifelong collection by buying the remaining Nintendo 64 games released in North America and then livestreaming a playthrough of every last one on Twitch. Two hundred and ninety-six games was no small feat, but compared to almost every other console in existence it just felt a bit more attainable. I started doing the research to see how expensive this project would be and honestly it was way more than the average person would invest. While I didn’t tally up the totals as I went on, completing the collection probably cost me a few thousand dollars over the course of a few years. It was not pocket change and a bit of a financial risk. I didn’t expect a return, it was just the collector in me wanting to finish what I started out doing – owning an entire set of Nintendo 64 games.

Collecting for the Nintendo 64 is an extremely complicated goal. Many individual games cost hundreds of dollars due to extremely small production runs and some even being exclusive to rental stores. On top of that, there is a large counterfeit market for some of the more expensive titles. It’s easy to get scammed. Luckily, I had done my research and I now knew exactly what to look for – how to open up cartridges, the best ways to clean them, the best ways to verify boards. This lead down a rabbit hole and I had begun doing mods to let my console play imported games. Equipment was purchased to give myself the best possible quality on a stream within reason. In a matter of months, I had become a self taught expert on the Nintendo 64 internals of the consoles and cartridges alike.

By the time I had completed purchasing about 75% of the console library, it was off to begin planning for streams. At this point, I was unsure if I was going to stream the entire library or just start it and see how it felt. I did a few test streams just playing random games for small chunks of time. The picture quality looked better than expected and returning to streaming just felt like riding a bike. I instantly remembered what I enjoyed about it to begin with. I knew this was what I wanted to attempt.

On August 18, 2019, I was off to the races by starting off with the game that started it all, Super Mario 64. My history with Super Mario 64 goes all the way back to playing it on the previously mentioned Christmas Eve in 1996. Much later in life, it became the first game I learned to speedrun. I had a lot of history streaming Mario 64 and have probably streamed more hours of it than any other game. This first stream was going to be a little different. I was going to do something I had never attempted before, doing 100% of the game in one sitting. An eight hour stream to kick off this large event just felt like the right thing to do.

I was pleased to find that the reception was pretty good. Taking a lot of time off streaming, I was thrilled that some of my old audience came back to check it out. I was very blessed with a large raid from one of my oldest twitch friends JSmithOTI which also brought some new eyes to the project. I had developed a small fanbase which was the one piece that was really crucial to motivate me to play through this entire library of games on stream. They proved over the next few years to be extremely dedicated, loyal, and supportive. Without the audience, I 100% never would have been able to do this. I am so extremely grateful.

After this stream, I had solidified that the plan was going to be seen through. I started doing the behind the scenes things that needed to be done to really get the project rolling. Over the course of the first month I had slowly developed a stream layout to help give the stream a little bit of flavor. A schedule was created for a more consistent time for streams 3-4 days a week. I started implementing custom notifications for followers and subscribers, just mimicking what I had seeing many streamers do before me. The decision to rank games as I went formed and a Google spreadsheet was created to document everything along the way. A Discord server was created to keep up with my community and allow some automated posting of stream notifications. One of the biggest regrets of this experience from the beginning was not figuring all of this out before the first stream. While it did allow for the community to help form it along the way, it made the first month or two of streams feel a bit detached from the many months later. I am a bit of an archiver so I made sure to locally save all the streams as I went, but early on I didn’t understand the way Twitch uses highlights to long term archive. Many of the early streams can only be found on my personal hard drive due to this.

Decisions also had to be made on what the challenge was. Completing a game may seem obvious for certain titles, but what does it mean for others? How do you complete a fighting game? A puzzle game? A sports game? There were a lot of questions that had to be answered. The real answer was, I never took the art of the challenge seriously. This was always meant to be a fun exercise and an excuse to stream all of these games I was purchasing. The decision was quickly made for things to be on a case to case basis. Due to the sheer quantity of sports games, I would just simply win a game of each. This made sports games only last an hour or so, but also kept the content moving and more interesting. Some of the more popular games I would stretch out to a full 100% playthrough. This was usually reserved for the games people really wanted to see or ones that I personally enjoyed. The rules about cheating were also pretty casual and relaxed. I’m not the greatest gamer in the world, in fact I would dare to say I’m pretty mediocre at most genres of games. I would make solid attempts at completing games, but if the scenario required a cheat code to be entered or a Gameshark to be used, so be it. Purists will probably say I didn’t accomplish a true challenge here and I’m here to state that I really never cared about how others perceived my challenge.

As time went on, I continued purchasing the final games I needed to complete the collection. I would turn these in to some bonus stream content by showing them off and cleaning them on stream as they came in. It was a nice way to get out some creativity between game playthroughs by switching up the content occasionally. Much later in the streams, after I had acquired all of the cartridges, I had also done bonus streams of my own content just to keep things a bit more varied and exciting for me. While I loved streaming Nintendo 64 games, it didn’t allow me much in terms of creativity. I had figured out my content for years with little wiggle room for sneaking in my own ideas. In my earlier streaming days I would have to come up with new ideas multiple times a week. With this challenge, I was doing the same thing week after week. In the end, this was one of the biggest unexpected challenges. Repetition can sometimes get the best of you.

The next big thing to happen with the stream was when Twitch decided to implement a new feature called “channel points”. These would reward long term watchers and subscribers of a stream with a fake currency that could be used to trade in for perks. I thought I would have some fun with this new feature and make an expensive goal. In exchange for what was likely watching hundreds of hours of my stream, a viewer could cash in 100,000 of these channel points in exchange for the opportunity to “skip the line”. This would take any game of their choice from later in the library and make it the next entry I played. It kept things exciting. At any moment, someone could choose my fate and make me play a great game or make me play a terrible one. I figured at this expensive cost it would be rarely used. Over the course of the challenge, it was used nearly a dozen times. Most of the times, this feature was great, but as I neared the end of the library, I quickly learned that many of the better games had already been tapped and the library started growing a bit more stale. I have no regrets implementing this feature, but it definitely changed the dynamic of the library more than I had anticipated.

Once I hit various milestones with the challenge, I would feel rejuvenated and be given a new boost of energy. I rarely felt like quitting. On the occasions I was feeling down and defeated, my community was always there to pick me up. The hardest parts of the challenge were the long form games that didn’t really interest me. Playing a game for weeks on end that I wasn’t feeling would definitely drain me mentally. Luckily, these experiences infrequently happened back to back.

As I started nearing the end of the library, a bunch of new emotions had come in to play. On a positive note, what had seemed like a giant waste of money investing in all these games had suddenly become just that – an investment. The video gaming market hit a huge boom in the past year and many of those games have doubled or tripled in value. On top of that, the generosity of my community over the past two years helped to pay off all the money I had invested in games and equipment. What had started as a project I assumed I would lose money on had somehow turned in to just a fun project that didn’t cost me any money. It only cost me a few thousand hours of my life.

While most of the experience of playing the entire Nintendo 64 library on Twitch was extremely positive, a lot of other emotions had also turned up. Streaming is an extremely difficult thing. It’s putting yourself out there and opening yourself up to an audience. In an introvert like myself, this can sometimes lead to a lot of extra anxiety and sometimes a strange sense of loneliness. It’s one of the only industries out there where you really have a one way relationship with the audience. You’re speaking to them in voice, some of them are speaking back to you in text. A lot of larger streamers talk about the parasocial relationships that are built on Twitch – luckily as a small streamer, I feel like I have always used Twitch in a way to make friends. It still can mess with your head a bit that people know a lot about you while you know very little about your audience as a whole. I tried my best to use this experience to learn more about the individuals that watched my streams and made the best of my time and think I handled this all pretty well.

Internet trolls could also make streaming an anxious scenario. While 99% of viewers are just there to see what’s going on or to check in on the challenge, that other 1% of people that only show up to mess with you can lead to trust issues when seeing new names in chat. While I didn’t deal with a lot of problems over the course of the challenge, by the end I definitely became wary whenever I’d see a new name pop up in chat. I felt like I had fostered a pretty tight knit community, so whenever a new name popped up I instantly feared for what the response would be. It never feels good to question anyone new that shows up and hopefully over time I’ll learn to relax a bit more internally on this stuff.

As of about 24 hours ago from writing this very sentence that you’re reading, I have completed the Nintendo 64 challenge. I completed all 296 licensed Nintendo 64 games (plus one bonus unlicensed game released in 2019) in about 1550 hours. I learned a lot about myself and about game development from that era over the past two years. I have zero regrets from starting this challenge and the results exceeded my expectations.

If you are reading this and considering doing a challenge for yourself, I say go for it. Learn from my successes, learn from my mistakes. If you ever want advice, feel free to ask! There are surprisingly a lot of people doing similar things all over the internet. Plenty of advice to be found. My ultimate advice would be don’t take it too seriously, just try to have fun.

From here, I am taking a break from streaming and moving on to a new project that I’ve always wanted to do – game development. My biggest takeaway from years of streaming one challenge is the confidence to complete a goal that I set forward to do – even if it takes a lot of time.

One of the biggest questions I got while streaming was what is the next streaming challenge. I’ve always said there is no way I would go through the process of physically collecting another set of games again. Since then, I’ve begun working on the early stages of collecting for the aforementioned Sega Dreamcast. While I don’t plan on ever doing another challenge like this, you never know where the future will take you. Closing the door, but it’s still unlocked.

All I know is whereever I go from here, I’m far more confident about my ability to take it on.

Thank you to everyone who has watched. Thank you to everyone who is reading this. Thank you to everyone who has believed in me. It means the world.

-braktheman

Twitch
Twitter

How the WWE is becoming uncomfortable

Wrestling. Ever since I was in middle school, professional wrestling has been a part of my life. I love most everything about it. The soap opera level storylines. The athleticism. The dedication. The passion. Everyone in the industry seems to just completely live it and the end product reflects on it.

Last night was the yearly iteration of WWE SummerSlam – a celebration at the end of the summer and one of the big four WWE shows of the year. This years event had an extra aura of excitement around it with a brand new Universal Champion being crowned for the first time ever and a transitional period of the company switching over to separate brands. It’s a time of excitement. With a whopping 13 matches over the course of 5 hours there was something for everyone.

Unfortunately, for all the promises the show had it also had a ton of downfalls. We could have a chat about how five hours is much too long for a wrestling event, but you probably all agree with that. I could talk about how WWE is building up a Women’s Revolution yet placing their huge title match at the second slot of the night and the competitors almost killing themselves trying to prove they deserve higher billing, but I’m not. I could tell you about how I think the main event caliber match up between the company workhorse – John Cena, and the indie darling – AJ Styles did a lot to devalue finishing moves, but I think there are bigger problems. I could probably go at length about watching a guy I’m supposed to cheer for beat up a bad guy champion before a match begins to the point of said high profile match not even taking place, but there is something that bothers me even more.

I want to just talk about the finish of last nights show and what I perceive as a major problem in wrestling. In the main event of the night we have two long time employees who have never faced each other at a pay-per-view event one on one finally making that happen. In one corner is the returning Randy Orton, a once billed “legend killer” who coming off a year long injury wants to make a statement in one of his first returning matchups. In the other corner is Brock Lesnar, the muscle who just wants to beat people up. In 12 years, somehow these two have never faced each other making this what many would refer to as a “dream match.”

It was billed to be an absolute fight instead of your typical wrestling match and that’s exactly what we got. Lesnar, having an MMA background, did his typical thing of tons of suplexes and punches with the match eventually turning in to an absolute bloodbath. As Orton laid on the mat clutching his head, blood began pouring everywhere out of his head. Lesnar continues wailing on him with continuous punches to the head. Referees flood the ring to clean up the carnage while the punches continue. Lesnar looks possessed like an unstoppable beast.

It’s not uncommon for wrestlers to bleed or even cut themselves to add drama and storytelling to a match, but this was on levels I have rarely seen before. It’s unknown at this point how much of this was intentional or if things just quickly got out of hand, but from a viewing perspective it all looked a bit scary. It was an example of wrestling not being fun. Not being entertaining. We all know wrestling is scripted, but the events that took place here just looked too real. Something seemed very wrong. Even if its for storyline purposes, no one should be beaten to the point of needing 10 staples in their head to close a very real wound. That’s hazardous to the perfomer and can do serious damage with life long effects.

As WWE moves on to a more family friendly approach, the use of blood becomes more and more infrequent. As other professional sports see major problems with head trauma and concussions, seeing this kind of absolute brutality is unsettling and unwelcome. As a long time viewer of wrestling myself, I appreciate a lot of the industry and find it as a form of entertainment. I like seeing the characters interact with each other and I like seeing the athleticism. When things turn to pure violence though and everything feels a bit too real, it makes me completely uncomfortable. The risks these wrestlers and performers take sometimes feels utterly unnecessary.

We are in a new age of wrestling where mainstream is beginning to feel more like the independent scene. Wrestlers are using more innovative maneuvers and trying things outside the box that keep the product feeling fresh and exciting. It’s fun to watch a lot of these performers each week because you truly don’t know what you are going to see. Resorting to dangerous violence doesn’t seem to be something that ever needs to happen to prove someone is powerful. It’s bad for the health of performers and it alienates large portions of the audience.

Take a look at what WWE is doing in their developmental NXT league. When you examine Samoa Joe, the former champion, you see someone who has been built up to be a villain. Yes, he beats people up and things can get “violent” but it is all shown through wrestling maneuvers. He doesn’t need to just punch people until they are a bloody mess in the ring and continue beating them at their most vulnerable point. Leave that to ultimate fighting where people expect it. Even the NXT women’s champion Asuka comes off as a powerhouse force but does all of it within the rules of wrestling.

I can’t give up on wrestling because of the gross events of a single match, but I do hope the WWE can learn from itself. I’m hoping as Raw introduces the Cruiserweight division that maybe the scales can be tipped back towards wrestling instead of contests where people just beat each other up instead of having actual matches. Yes, professional wrestling is a place for competition but it’s also a place for good fun. Lets just try to cut out some of the graphic violence. You’re better than this, WWE.

For all the steps the company has taken forward, the 2016 iteration of SummerSlam felt like a giant step backwards. I am confident the company can move past some of the events of this major show and keep up its forward momentum and I will continue watching in hopes of that. Wrestling has always been an important part of my life and I hope it can go on filling that part of my heart for many years to come.

Her Story: A New Form of Interactive Storytelling

I woke up this morning with the intention of burning through the majority of Batman: Arkham Knight throughout the day. At some point that veered in a different direction as I took a break from my console only to travel back to the year 1994 with the indie game Her Story. I’ve always had a fascination with unique storytelling and full motion video so this game seemed like a no brainer combo for me to give a quick glance at. After I booted it up, I quickly became engrossed in the mysteries of the story and spent the following five hours playing through the entire game and reading theories from other people who have also experienced Her Story.

Her Story isn’t the longest game. Her Story isn’t really even a difficult game. You might even want to avoid using the word game as this is more of an interactive story experience. With roughly 90 minutes of FMV footage it’s unlikely that you will spend more than 3 hours doing a full playthrough of the game. Luckily, at $7 on Steam or $5 on iOS this game is priced like a movie and therefore well worth the money.

The gameplay is extremely simple as you take the role of a character researching an old murder case via short snippets of video from seven interviews that took place over 20 years ago. With over 250 video clips to watch in the game, you quickly piece together these police interviews to learn exactly what happened in this case through a suspect’s point of view. It’s very difficult to discuss this game in a spoiler free manor, but revealing any details of the plot would be a disservice to anyone looking to give this a try.

The way you access these video clips is through a computer system that was broken from the Y2K bug leaving indexes and video files in shambles. Unfortunately, none of these clips actually contain any of the detectives questions forcing you to piece together the story through the short and fractured answers. Each video clip is broken down into individual answers from single questions and range anywhere from mere seconds to around a minute. On top of that, the only way you can find these video clips is by searching for keywords of your choosing. If a keyword you search appears in the dialogue of that video, the first five clips show up in the search feed allowing you to watch them at your leisure. Using context clues of the story allows you to search for key topics that might give you more information from the same interview. For example, if the suspect was answering a question with specific names or locations, you could then search for those names and locations to find more of the surrounding interview. If that isn’t your style, you can just type in random topics and see if a new strand of story pops up. This gives the game a fractured style of storytelling that gives everyone their own “choose your own adventure” experience.

What I love so much about this game is that the story is written in a clever way that even though you may be able to piece together the basic framework of the incident early on, there are still many mysteries hidden within it. Even when I thought I had it all figured out, more twists and turns would pop up that I didn’t expect. The acting is pretty good for an FMV game that only stars one actress. I was expecting this to be pretty awful as most FMV games tend to be, but was pleasantly surprised by some of the scenes in the game. Nothing about it is large budget and everything takes place in a few static rooms, but for the type of story this tells that is all it needs to be.

Even after I finished the game, parts of the story were still left up to interpretation and part of the experience for me was reading numerous fan theories that all actually had some concrete evidence to back them up. I still can’t pick a side on how some details worked and I absolutely love that style of interpretive storytelling. Immediately after completing the game 100%, I went in to the video files in the installation directory and watched all the fractured story played in sequential order. It allowed me to see exactly how things went down in the police interviews and even had me catching some details I missed out on the first time through. If you do play through this, I highly recommend taking that approach afterwards.

While I think everyone that appreciates an original indie game experience will enjoy this one, Her Story isn’t a perfect game. Her Story accelerates in the story telling elements, but the mechanics of the gameplay are sluggish and outdated. The game plays like a computer from the late 90s in the worst way possible with clunky UI and an ancient feel. It was easy for me to feel nostalgic about this at first, but as I tried literally piecing the story together in-game via the virtual computer’s video browser I quickly learned how inefficient this game is. Trying to drag and drop a video clip from one end of a list to another became a monotonous and tedious process that took minutes. I’m not sure if this was done purposely to discourage people from watching video clips in order, but it’s an unnecessary frustration in my eyes. The UI isn’t enough to ruin the game experience, yet it keeps this game from feeling perfect. I played through the Steam version of this game and I anticipate that the iOS version has a similar interface.

The fractured storytelling elements of Her Story are something very special that I hope is imitated for years to come. My experience of this game was absolutely delightful and I implore any fans of indie games or even just mystery stories to check this out. Play through it and then come discuss the specific plot points with me and we can have a fun filled theory session. I sincerely hope you all check this out and that we get more games like this from Sam Barlow and the rest of the team.

Check out the game on Steam and iOS

10 Tips For A Successful E3 Press Conference

It’s that time of the year again.

In a little over a week video game enthusiasts from around the world will flock to California to watch the Nintendo World Championships… I mean attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo – a once a year convention for all things video games. All the major players will be involved to show off the latest and greatest offerings for the coming years. One of the biggest traditions of the show are press conferences from the juggernauts of the industry telling us why they are great and why the competition is terrible. A war of electronics. A virtual bloodbath of one-ups.

In this market if you hope to succeed with a successful press conference, you’re going to need to pull out every last trick in the book. Here are some simple tips to follow if you hope to really connect with your audience when it comes to your showing.

Here are my tips and tricks for a successful E3 conference.

1) A fast paced overview trailer of all your offerings backed with a dubstep soundtrack

This is super important in order to succeed in the gaming industry. All of your fans love sick beats and can totally get behind hard-hitting action shots and firing guns to a dope-ass bass line. When the beat drops, that’s when you hit them with the Call of Duty inspired 560 no scope.

2) Quirky hosts with awesome catch phrases

Everyone loves humor. Everyone loves video games. If you combine the two, there’s no chance it can fail. Having a host or two that can repeat lots of trending hashtags for your audience to livetweet means better brand awareness. It really doesn’t matter that your awkward hosts are having an uncomfortable exchange of riffs where they aren’t really sure what is going on with the live conference due to a lack of communciation… as long as the people out there are making fun of them with the onscreen hashtag it means your brand is reaching the maximum audience possible. You did it! #forthewin!

3) Exciting partnerships with a variety of brands

Hey kids! Grab your Totino’s Bagel Bites and your Coke Zero because the age of Mountain Dew and Doritos is behind us! Make sure the people who play on your console know about the new Amazon app that lets you send the latest in pre-approved brands directly to their mouth holes! With camera and audio support let them set up custom gestures that when they lift both arms simultaneously it sends off a distress signal. A drone will be arriving at their home within 30 minutes delivering all the carbs they need in exchange for a small fee and a minor amount of dignity. Well done! Now they can focus on playing more games!

4) Relaunch a franchise no one remembers

Now all we need for a successful conference are a few great games. Lets rely on nostalgia from a generation of fresh out of college techies with a newly disposable income. Pick a franchise so old that people barely remember the gameplay and put a shiny coat of paint on it. Everyone loves a good reboot and when the title of a game you released in the early 90s pops up on the big screen the audience will completely lose their minds. You’ll have them in the palm of your hands. Make sure the reboot is gritty. This is important. If your game archives only go back a few years then just skip to the next step…

5) HD Special Edition Ultimate Uncensored Collection EX Remix

Really milk your recent hits by collecting paydays on them multiple times. Everyone loved that game you released a few years ago on those old consoles. Slap some HD shine on them and let everyone experience those classics again. The great thing about an HD collection is that every console cycle is another opportunity. If you already released an HD collection, have no fear. Just package any available DLC with it and throw a Game of the Year sticker on it. People will rebuy it. It’s all that’s in the market anyway.

6) Cinematic trailers

Make sure that when you’re showing off your new flagship titles that you don’t show too much gameplay. We can’t let them know that the console graphics are unpolished and partially broken. Invest lots of time in CGI trailers instead of continuing to work on your game. The less they see about the game and the more it feels like watching a movie, the more your audience will enjoy it. Bravo! You sold them on your new turn based free-to-play game by showing a video of females with little to no clothes on. Definitely didn’t alienate 50% of the human population there. It doesn’t end here though because this goes hand in hand with step #7…

7) Make sure your console game demos are running on a high end PC instead of a dev kit

We can’t show weakness in the graphic department. Make lots of flashy promises about high resolution hair follicles and exciting bloom effects. Show them that the graphics look great but make sure to hide that this isn’t running on an actual console. I mean they’re all going to preorder it immediately anyway – you already have their money. You can always fix those graphics down the line with a patch.

8) Awkward participants doing live demos of motion controlled games

If your game doesn’t have support for a waggling controller or menus controlled solely by hand gestures, then you’re doing something incorrect. Make sure to show off these great features you worked so hard to add by having a live demonstration on the stage. When things inevitably go wrong, just blame it on the poor lighting conditions or call it a work-in-progress. We know things aren’t going to change with it, but maybe the excuse will fool a few people.

9) Make incredible collectors items and sell them in impossibly small quantities

Everyone owns your newest console and sales are declining. It’s probably time to slap on a new feature or two and throw it in a beautiful custom shell available to the first 250 people that preorder them. When it sells out, never manufacture it again. Make sure to invoke the fear in consumers by promising that if they miss out on a 30 second window preordering from a server on life support that they will never experience this amazing item without paying a scalper 500% the original price. I mean, it’s out of your hands anyway.

10) Usher

Everyone loves Usher. Close your conference with a 90 minute Usher concert.

If you follow 0-3 of these, it’s not enough.
4-6 means you’re getting there.
7-9 puts you in the running for greatest company of all time.
If you can hit all 10 of these points… jackpot, baby. You win.

That’s it.

Ten simple steps for a successful E3 press conference.

I wish you the best of luck and have a #great #E3!

2014 In Review

2014 is coming to a close. Everyone is dashing around making tough choices on what to pick as their game of the year and celebrate all the achievements of the industry. Looking through the games I played this year, I decided I couldn’t do a “best of” list any sort of justice. Instead, here is a list of games I wasted time on instead of playing the great games in my backlog.

Gridiron Solitaire

A football management game based around a deck of cards. Graphically, a real bare bones experience with a premise that seems too heavily based around luck. What could have been a unique game just feels like white noise due to the flaws and slow paced gameplay. This one is not something I will ever be returning to.

Goat Simulator

A popular simulator that launched a craze throughout the industry. I have strong beliefs that due to its success this game encourages developers to release buggy games under the guise of entertainment value. While there is some fun humor to be had here, there are much better ways to create and release a game. I will admit I have not returned yet to try the free MMO DLC that came out recently, but this is a game I just can’t recommend.

Recovery Search & Rescue Simulation

I’m a bit torn on this game. At its core, this is one terrible simulation game. You ride around a park on bike eating energy bars and solving mysteries via GPS coordinates. The world is jam packed with illogical set pieces that seem to just be used because they were available from some sort of Unity object pack. It’s commonplace to just find a large inflatable alligator in the middle of a woods giving the game a weird empty horror feel. On the other hand, this game has a subtle way of understanding how horrible it is and makes fun of itself. The writing in this game is incredible and that’s the crazy reality of it all. Set pieces are all tied together with bizarre storylines and absurd missions. This is one that I can almost recommend.

LocoCycle

Speaking of absurdity, LocoCycle saw it’s PC release in 2014 and it is one wild ride. Even though the game features repetitive levels and boring gameplay, an interesting FMV storyline pieces everything together in to an overall fun gaming experience. This one isn’t going to win any awards, but if you have four hours to kill it’s a humorous ride. Lots of pop culture references and nearly an hour of live action cinematics make this one of the few games on the list worth playing.

Car Mechanic Simulator 2014

Car Mechanic Simulator 2014 is a dull barebones look at the auto service industry… yet I find some sort of a strange appeal to this game that has made me play it on multiple occasions. It’s unlikely you are going to learn any real world skills here, but there is a puzzle game approach that keeps me interested. Half the time I’m just wandering around figuring out where parts go since the game lacks any sort of tutorial, yet running diagnostics on certain parts and figuring out how to service a car into a certain price range is kind of interesting. A strange metal soundtrack and some of the worst driving controls I’ve ever seen on the test track really bring together this game into a bizarre package. Don’t play. Or do play it. I don’t care.

GAUGE

What is likely the most seizure inducing game I have ever played, this one is for very few people. The premise is simple and mysterious and the entire game is about racking up points by tapping a button or two to keep a meter in a high scoring zone. You have no idea what you are getting in to until you see this game in motion or play it yourself. Distractions are constantly being thrown at you through audio and visuals. It’s not uncommon to see words telling you to do things you shouldn’t be doing on screen or images and video of cats or things randomly being reversed on screen. There are no rules to this game and the longer you play the harder it gets. I’ve played a lot of strange games, but this one is definitely up there in terms of design.

Tree Simulator 2013: Treeloaded

While many people argue that certain things aren’t games, this one ranks up there. You are a tree. There is a day and night cycle. No controls other than moving the camera around. You sit in a world and watch nature around you. It is a tree simulator in the most literal sense. There is something strangely relaxing about it, but still it is something I can’t recommend. If you are really interested in it, I once played this game for nearly two hours on a Twitch stream and slowly lost my mind. It has since become the most popular archive of anything I’ve ever participated in. While this is the only game on the list that didn’t actually release in 2013, it did receive some free content updates in this year.

Warehouse and Logistics Simulator

Here is just one of a billion junky simulators I played in 2014 and a prime example of “simulators that don’t need to exist”. If you want to play a better forklift simulator, just check out Shenmue. I didn’t play any of the other games on this list drunk except for this one and I still couldn’t find any amusement. The one thing this game has going for it is the fact that it has zombie DLC that turns the game in to “Hell’s Warehouse”. Pass.

Ampu-Tea

Along with the simulator craze, a related obsession are games with QWOP-like controls. Ampu-Tea is the worst of this group and has you in control of a disembodied mechanical arm where you individually control each finger and try to make a cup of tea. Varying difficulties leave you with many options and the game is usually a struggle of not glitching out and getting your arm stuck in a solid surface. I spent many hours 100%ing this game and I absolutely hate it. I could have done so much more with my time.

Frederic: Resurrection of Music and Frederic: Evil Strikes Back

Here are two games that found their Steam releases this year and while they aren’t terrible they did slowly tip me towards the brink of insanity. An average music engine makes this a fun game that’s brought down a fair amount of racist depictions of countries and a soundtrack that has its ups and downs. On my attempt to 100% this game, I found myself playing the same few songs for hours on end trying to get a high ranking which is difficult on a poorly ported system from touch devices. If you’re in to music games, these are inexpensive ones that have some entertainment value, but they definitely are not for every audience.

Depth Hunter 2: Deep Dive

I can’t figure out why I threw six hours in to this game… it’s repetitive and boring. An undersea game where you search for hidden objects on the depth of the floor or find certain fish to hunt with your spear gun. There’s almost no danger involved. This is a glorified interactive Windows screensaver. The world around you looks nice, but there just isn’t any, for lack of a better term, depth to be found here. Constant bombardments of achievements to share with your friends on top of it all make this feel like a nicer looking free to play mobile game. You’re better off just swimming in a pool.

There you have it. A handful of games I played instead of playing some of the best releases this year. Here’s to a great 2015 and a whole new batch of junk to sort through.

The Dark Side of Twitch Hosting

There’s no doubt about it, Twitch is here to stay. Clocking in as the fourth highest network in terms of Internet traffic, the video game streaming service is extremely popular and seems to be gaining momentum to the tune of a rumored 1 billion dollars in value. With this popularity comes a rapidly growing user base and one that has become more competitive as time moves on. As the user base evolves, so must the service with the recent announcement of Twitch hosting.

Twitch hosting is a brand new feature which allows channels to “host” another stream while they are offline. This means that when you aren’t broadcasting live you can opt to feature one of your favorite streams from the comfort of your own channel in lieu of your own content. On paper, this is an amazing feature. It opens up a lot of avenues for communities to watch other content together when there isn’t a current broadcast taking place. For example, a weekly show goes off air and quickly switches over to a similar broadcaster’s feed keeping the same community engaged and a lively chat can continue with new content to watch. It allows large streamers to feature lesser known ones or rehost a much larger broadcast with their own chatroom to give a more intimate community experience. All of the viewing hits, ad revenue, and page views are reflected on the live streamer giving them all the advantages of traffic and extra buttons are added for those looking to subscribe to the alternate streamers channel.

From everything I have seen, this feature is being extremely well received and the majority of the community seems to be loving it. I have seen both ends with popular streamers with subscribers and a well built community praising it and lesser known streamers seeing a huge traffic increase and being excited about those numbers. There is a lot of good to come from this service and I don’t want to completely knock it. I believe with some possible revisions that this service could benefit everyone, but the pessimist in me has to look at it from all angles and I see some flaws that I’m a bit concerned about.

Twitch is a community driven experience. The reason the website works so well versus traditional archived media is the live chat aspect. I know that I love streaming over doing prerecorded video as it gives me nearly immediate feedback. Being able to see how people are responding to the content and being able to have conversations helps to mold the things I do and make a better product overall. I spend less time being concerned about minor errors in recorded audio or video issues and more time just pushing out content until it’s exactly the kind of presentation I want. It’s a weird thing to be in to, but it really has made me a better and more confident person. Twitch hosting may deliver more hits and page views for the streamer being featured, but it takes away the interactive element and keeps users in someone else’s chat room essentially splitting the audience. Increased numbers are an amazing thing to see and makes anyone feel good, but if these numbers are just viewers in a different chat room are they as valuable as those contributing? That is for the streamer to decide.

My biggest fear with this hosting service is that it will strengthen large communities at the cost of those smaller. I’ve heard many streamers say that this makes post-stream raids much easier, but while you are statistically raiding all it feels like is being done is keeping viewers on the original streamer’s page and making sure they don’t leave.

Lets say a large community with thousands of viewers and hundreds of folks in chat ends a stream and decides to raid a much smaller stream of a few dozen people. Are the viewers more likely to stay put in the chatroom they are sitting which is not only easier but also a larger community? Likely. Suddenly you have a smaller streamer unsure where this traffic is coming from and seeing no verbal feedback of it at all. Again, great for numbers but no real community is being brought to the featured streamer from this. Twitch hosting may make it more difficult for new communities to spring forward in the long term and the large streams will just continue seeing traffic staying on their pages making their communities more dedicated to each other and the page of the streamer they are sitting on.

I want to make it clear that I think increased exposure for smaller channels is a great thing and the concept of Twitch hosting makes a lot of sense. When it comes to using a smaller community to host streams of giant events like Awesome Games Done Quick or EVO or a League of Legends tournament a smaller more intimate chat environment, that makes a lot of sense to me. I would love to see for the reverse options for page redirects or tabs that show off both chatrooms much like third party service Multitwitch does.

Another thing that would be a nice addition would be some sort of feedback as to what channels are featuring you. To my knowledge, there are no options to see who is watching your content outside of your channel other than the increased view count. Knowing who was featuring them would allow the streamer the option to see other chatrooms and let them capitalize a bit more on what is going on. Maybe adding to the dashboard page the option to view chats hosting your content outside of your own would be another way of tackling the issue. There are a lot of avenues to explore that could really improve on this service.

To sum it all up, increased traffic is good for everyone at the end of the day. It ensures that the content we enjoy sticks around and the website continues to flourish and grow. More viewers is good for every single channel, big or small. The idea of Twitch hosting is pretty great and I really just hope it doesn’t turn in to another way for the large channels to keep growing while smaller ones are left behind.