This week we spent a lot of time exploring the Twitch platform.
We started out meeting with Will Hagen, a producer at Schell Games. Will is a Twitch enthusiast who has done several side projects, and is now at Schell working on a Twitch Play games. Will discussed with us the technology and design constraints of working with Twitch. Later we attended a presentation by Ethan, a Twitch representative, who discussed the engineering issues of reducing stream latency.
The primary constraint of Twitch is the latency issue. Players will not see the result of their input actions until around 15 seconds later. Designers tackle the problem a few ways, either by relying on turn based gameplay, or
The second thing we discussed is leveraging the beast that is the Twitch community. The psychology of Twitch hivemind is a fascinating thing, and the ability for a crowdplay game to make a player feel like they are involved in something more important than themselves is fascinating to watch.
BSC is a strange combination of Turn Based and Realtime elements, so it is apparent now that the current game cannot be ported as-is without some modification. How to pivot on the design while keeping the intention of the design is a real challenge.
We’ve also seen the importance of starting to create our game’s Twitch presence, and we’ve begun the hunt for some mid-level indie streamers to stream the game. We’ve begun talks with one streamer: more on that soon.