Now Recruiting! Be a Part of the Extra Life 2017 Team for Charity!

Squee9 wrote:

Depends on what the purpose of the GWJ channel is. Do we have a mission? A vision? A purpose? Are we a collection of people explaining games? Or just a collection of the community keeping content going on the channel?

That's where I'm having a bit of issue. Stream as much as you want on your personal channel but I feel like the GWJ channel itself might be better as a specific event-driven thing, where we are only using it if we can promote Extra Life in some way. That's why I'd like to try and get some group stuff going, so even if a single player game is being played, then others can be listening in on Curse or something and also conversing on the stream.

I got permission from the Overlords, but I don't really want to be taking it over since I still feel it is their thing. We're just leasing it a bit. So perhaps if you do a specific game regularly, we have you on the GWJ channel one night to talk Extra Life a bit, play the game, and at the end tell people when and where you normally stream.

Does that make sense?

I added an event for this Saturday - mostly as a test to see if the sharing worked. I'll confirm if I can actually stream then later today.

Squee9 wrote:

It's all about your style. I think more people would enjoy hearing your thought process behind your decisions as you're making them, or other stuff about your life. The benefit and the joy of streaming is the live interaction, so people expect some degree of that.

That said, it's the internet, so there are plenty of people around who are down to chill and watch some Warhammer with a few intense whispers.

Depends on what the purpose of the GWJ channel is. Do we have a mission? A vision? A purpose? Are we a collection of people explaining games? Or just a collection of the community keeping content going on the channel?

Great point. I'm happy to support the overall mission and wouldn't be ready to stream until mid March at the earliest.

Could the new Communities feature be used? I've only just had a bit of a look at Twitch this week, but seems like it could be useful? Link it all to that GWJ community that's mentioned in the streaming thread, or make an Extra Life community on the side? It says it's in Beta, so not sure if sorted for consoles, was going to have a bit more of a dig into it over the weekend.

Oh, wow... I didn't know about Twitch Communities. There's a post on the Twitch blog with a good overview of them. Could be an interesting way to group the GWJ streamers together, at the very least. I still think having the GWJ channel host individual streamers will be ideal, and the Twitch Communities feature could be used to easily list and browse the community's streamers.

Added a link to the GWJ Community page and to the calendar to the top of the original post. Always remember to check there for easy access to information.

Firstly, I want to thank you guys for the interest so far.

Bubblefuzz, a new Overwatch character should be announced soon, so I'm probably going to try and set up a stream for PS4 players on a Saturday after the character has been announced. Do you think that'd work? I figure Saturday would allow us to start earlier so it's not so late at night for you.

ccesarano wrote:

Bubblefuzz, a new Overwatch character should be announced soon, so I'm probably going to try and set up a stream for PS4 players on a Saturday after the character has been announced. Do you think that'd work? I figure Saturday would allow us to start earlier so it's not so late at night for you.

If I'm around and the TV is available to me then up for that yep. 11pm GMT tother half has usually gone to bed if we're in - I could hop on for an hour or two then - but don't go out of the groups way to accommodate too much - I'll jump on where I can.

Overwatch is a bit of an issue in our house at the moment too. My wife doesn't like the game and I've not managed to convince her otherwise. It might be an interesting issue to post elsewhere at some point, but basically she works as a student welfare manager at a secondary school and online MP games are one of the biggest child protection issues she deals with at the moment. Overwatch being the most popular is the one that crops up a lot apparently so puts it at the top of her hitlist. I tried defending the game and put forward the case that it's actually quite a positive game in many ways compared to most but she was having none of it. I can still play, but just wise not too when she's around if I don't want the scowls

Have you asked her if she'd dislike baseball if kids kept coming in beaten with baseball bats?

Spoiler:

Don't actually ask her that I'm a terrible person with a terrible sense of humor Extra Life is just how I cleanse my soul.

I think you mean cricket but yeah, I'll pass that thought on... **ouch**

Spoiler:

I really won't :)

Tonight I'll be doing a sort of warm-up for Zelda with a stream of Hollow Knight. I'll be starting on my Twitch channel around 8pm ET so if you're awake please come by and keep me company, while also providing feedback on my "talking to myself but with an audience" capability.

I'm interested in streaming this year, but I'm not clear on the particulars. Such as:

  • When?
  • How long at a sitting? (I can't do a full 25 hours in a row with two kids)
  • How do I go about getting sponsors?
  • What sorts of games?

Other than that, I'm good to go from a technical standpoint, and I have my own (horribly neglected) twitch channel.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
  • When?
  • How long at a sitting? (I can't do a full 25 hours in a row with two kids)

These two are kind of tied into each other. The November Game Day is an optional thing that adds a fun communal flair to it, as well as "the struggle". However, not everyone's a spring chicken capable of shrugging off responsibilities to stay up 24-25 hours straight.

So what I've stressed to people when recruiting at conventions is to find creative ways around it or spread it apart. When gamerparent did it our first year I believe he did it in two twelve hour stretches where someone in his family needed to be playing. So he'd pass the controller off to his daughters and come back later and such. Similarly, you and your wife could do a tag-team trade off thing, so it's the two of you under one account.

Two twelve hour days, four six hour days, or six four hour days... however you want to split it up. Or, just make it something you plan to do on the regular. Have people vote on the game they want you to play. So on and so forth.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
  • How do I go about getting sponsors?

I basically nag friends and family on Facebook. I haven't had much luck with co-workers and my YouTube audience. We'll see if streaming regularly this year helps with that effort.

Last year I donated a bit to everyone, which had both Extra Life and Paypal paranoid that I was a bot or not who I claimed to be. I want to try and get some sort of cross promotion going this year, but with real money involved am not sure how open folks would be to it.

Let's say we did a group Unreal Tournament 2K4 stream. Every time you frag someone, they now owe $1 to your donation page.

The problem, obviously, is a single match of UT2K4 can get expensive that way. So perhaps ten cents or a quarter per kill? Or maybe figure out ways to get the audience involved. Perhaps something where donating to someone, even $1, gets a vote to determine how that person plays a game.

Since real money is involved, it's hard to try and figure out something reasonable without feeling slimy. Should I reach out to Team Cherry and see if I can raffle off a download code for Hollow Knight to anyone that donated during the stream? I dunno!

I wanted to get a regular streaming schedule set up first. I think I'm good with Sunday nights on the regular and enjoyed streaming Hollow Knight last night. So I'll update the calendar to Sunday being a regular slot for me. doogiemac, did you do your test HoTS stream?

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
  • What sorts of games?

Whatever sort you have. We'll be arranging multiplayer nights in time but honestly, I plan on streaming anything I feel like playing that week, with some lead-up to try and spread the word out.

I'll look through my Steam list and see what sorts of multiplayer games I have and haven't played yet. I know Mercenary Kings is in there. And if I did a Sunday night Mercenary Kings session with other GWJers, I could probably nag the Overlords into uploading it to the GWJ Plays YouTube.

Sounds good. I'll see if I can work something out for a streaming schedule.

I added two new items, one for my Sunday slot, and one for Splatoon 2 Global Test Fire on the 24th... at 11pm ET. I have a convention to attend that Saturday so that's really the best time I have to Stream it. :/

Doogiemac, do you want me to set the GWJ Twitch to host you on Saturday?

ccesarano wrote:

I added two new items, one for my Sunday slot, and one for Splatoon 2 Global Test Fire on the 24th... at 11pm ET. I have a convention to attend that Saturday so that's really the best time I have to Stream it. :/

Doogiemac, do you want me to set the GWJ Twitch to host you on Saturday?

Awesome! And, yes, that be great re: setting me as host. I shifted my time slot back a couple of hours due to needing to meet up with a friend.

Should we draft some talking points up in the original post so that streamers know to mention the Extra Life, how to donate, how to get involved, etc?

I got surprised by my friends with a plan for activities on my birthday, which is tomorrow. As a result, I have no idea if I'll be able to stream or not. For now, I'll mark my calendar entry as tentative.

Alright, keep me informed.

I'll see about getting some info up regarding the talking points before then.

CC and I have been talking; I think my idiots and I might take our show on the road to GWJ this year instead of Giant Bomb. If I go grab a Switch tonight, I'll probably stream a little over the weekend.

I still need to get up to speed with NodeCG. Oof.

I'll have to do a test with somebody at some point, I know Twitch can be a little bit laggy for NZ players.

My Zelda stream got cut short but a bunch of friends had a good time watching some gameplay. I need to work out how to deal with when I'm concentrating on something, as I'll suddenly stop talking as I work out a problem or get fully engaged in combat.

I missed watching your Zelda stream - tried to tune in but you must have logged out by the time I hopped in. Later in the evening, cthos and I jumped into Guild Wars 2 and I was able to figure out how to configure the streaming settings so we'd capture audio from the game and from Curse. It worked like a charm!

What are you using to stream from the switch? The only solution I've seen for getting HDMI into a computer costs a couple hundred bucks and introduces a lot of latency.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

What are you using to stream from the switch? The only solution I've seen for getting HDMI into a computer costs a couple hundred bucks and introduces a lot of latency.

I'm using the Elgato HD60. However, it could be that the Elgato is why the stream failed at the end. It seems to have issues every so often. It is usually pretty painless, and it could have also been simply too much running on my PC at once. So I'll have to do more experiments in the future.

Right now they're doing a Twitter giveaway for a custom Zelda model.

doogiemac wrote:

I missed watching your Zelda stream - tried to tune in but you must have logged out by the time I hopped in. Later in the evening, cthos and I jumped into Guild Wars 2 and I was able to figure out how to configure the streaming settings so we'd capture audio from the game and from Curse. It worked like a charm!

Awesome. I should have done a test earlier because it seems like my stream had audio issues the entire time, unlike the Hollow Knight stream. So I definitely think it's my settings.

Hurray!

The HD60s are no end of trouble, IME. Better if you're only using one, but spotty and prone to drop-outs. StarTech USB3HDCAPs (specifically the HDMI/VGA/DVI models, they push a number of them on their Amazon page) are the best option I've found for low-latency input (a couple of frames or so, it's pretty tight). They're rebranded Micomsoft (the Framemeister guys) XCAPTURE-1s and can use later releases of the XCAPTURE-1 drivers, which are more stable and have more features. Right now I'm using three of them--two for way cheaper HDMI input from my cameras (because SDI input gear costs eight billion dollars and only one of my cameras has SDI outs anyway) and one for a console/PC drop. (There's also an HDMI matrix and a separate splitter in there to control what input source is pushing to the TV; conceivably I could do two TVs with two outputs, but I'd have to have two TVs. And a reason for two TVs.)

Those USB3HDCAPs are good enough to the point where I've seriously considered writing a driver for them for OS X.

I've read through this thread and lurked quite a bit on these fine forums. After listening to episode 542 of GWJCC I heard that the GWJ community was mobilising for Extra Life gaming marathon in November 2017 and upon hearing that I thought I'd offer to take part.

I have been streaming in Twitch every week for about 5 months now on a regular basis. I have streamed for an hour every Sunday at 8pm GMT/BST me playing a game on a different platform each time. My first stream was on Jetpac for the Commodore Vic 20 and the last episode was on Satellite Attack/UFO! on the Philips G7000/Magnavox Odyssey 2:

Spong Vault Twitch channel

On the 26th February 2017 I streamed for 8 hours while I played 8 specific games for 4 different platforms. This was in preparation for a podcast I am taking part in very soon for Retro Asylum. This is where 4 platforms are compared against one another based on the games that were ported to them. The links below will take you to the archive of this retro gaming mini-marathon:

8 Bit Wars 3 - Part 1 - Commodore 64
8 Bit Wars 3 - Part 2 - ZX Spectrum
8 Bit Wars 3 - Part 3 - Atari XL/XE
8 Bit Wars 3 - Part 4 - Amstrad CPC

So why am I telling you about this? Well I thought it would be fun to play 12 different games on 12 different platforms for Extra Life. I have the machines and the ability to stream as can be demonstrated above and am more than happy to pitch in and add a bit of a retro flavour to the charity event. It may even be a bit of a record braking activity, but I have not determined whether or not this is the case.

What do you think? Is this something the GWJ community would get behind?

I think that sounds great, Aeoringas! I think it's great if we have people doing gimmick things like this it will really help, I myself was toying of the idea of something along the lines of playing one game for 24 hours, but I'm not sure if I'll really do it. I think having more stuff like it makes it more of an event to get people interested.

Aeoringas, that sounds like an excellent plan of attack. We can probably highlight you on GWJ's stream at some point. When I have an opportunity I need to see about planning some things out, because I want to do my best to make this a real communal thing and I feel like I've done a poor job at that so far.

I may have to move my stream night out of Sunday, as well.

Clusks, my recommendation is that you play multiple games. It helps things move faster, where as just one game would eventually begin to drag on (unless you're playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the first time in which case easy 24 hours).

Thanks for the positive feedback, it's really appreciated. By the time November rolls around I'll have a solid plan of streaming, which will probably be me playing on platforms in chronological order i.e. Intellivision->ZX Spectrum->Amstrad CPC 128 -> Amiga etc

Here's to helping sick kids!

So I know my machine cannot run it well, and I don't have the $20, but if anyone is playing that Blackwake game Amanda has been discussing on the podcast, it sounds like a great game to stream. Does anyone here have it?

Love this idea. I'm signed up and joined the team.

I have a regular group of guys that I get together with periodically to do a LAN party. I'd like to try to coordinate a LAN party with this if that is ok?