Streaming games is great. But streaming games while your viewers can actively participate is even greater! But what are some of the ways to make a game stream more interactive?
In this article, we’ll look into three ways to make a game stream more interactive. Beginning with some easy methods and ending with some more involved ones.
1. Playing with viewers
The easiest way to make your stream more interactive is to make use of a game’s native ability to play with multiple people. Some games lend them better for multiplayer than others. In general, the best streamable multiplayer games tend to be those that have a low entry point.
Let’s take Mario Kart as an example, you don’t have to be a pro Mario Kart player to enjoy the game. Everyone and their mom has played Mario Kart at least once in their life, they all have a fair chance in the game due to the numerous powerup items.
Some games are even made purely to be played on stream with viewers. One of these games is Marbles on Steam, and in some capacity the later Jackbox games, you’re viewers don’t even need the game to play along!
2. Simple additive content
Not all games have multiplayer however. So if you can’t play with viewers to make your game stream more interactive, what can you do? You can leverage something I’d like to call simple additive content.
This is content you add to the game by providing your viewers a way to interact with the game in a way that normally isn’t possible. Take Little Nightmares 2 for example, a single-player horror/puzzle game. By adding sound effects that viewers can trigger, you’ll add an extra dimension to the stream.
Example of effective use of simple additive content.
You can get as creative with this as you want, but I like to keep it simple so I can quickly add other types of additive content for other games.
In the case of Little Nightmares 2, I have a scene that contains multiple sound effect sources. Using Lioranboard I toggle these sources on and off upon an incoming Channel Point redemption, but you could also use chat commands. It’s all up to you and your creativity!
3. Leverage powerful integration
Sometimes playing with viewers or having additive content just isn’t going to do it for you, you need more! In that case, it’s time to see if the game your playing has a deep integration with your streaming platform. If that integration isn’t there out of the box, there is a high chance the modding community has you covered.
In this article, I want to take TwitchSpawn as an example of a mod that provides deep integration with Twitch for the game Minecraft. TwitchSpawn listens to live events that happen on your Twitch channel such as chat messages, new followers, and Channel Point redemptions. Then it handles those events and takes action based on the ruleset you’ve created.
Everything possible with commands in vanilla Minecraft can be turned into an action with TwitchSpawn. But even if you have other mods installed you can make actions around those as long as they support commands you can execute.
The ruleset for the mod is written in an easy-to-understand language: TwitchSpawn Language (TSL). You declare what needs to happen, on what event, and under which conditions.
DROP minecraft:diamond 3
ON Donation
WITH amount IN RANGE [0,10]
A small bit of code from a TSL ruleset.
For example, the above piece of code tells the mod to spawn three diamonds in the game upon a donation that is between the amount of $0.00 and $10.00. There is almost no limit to what you can do, and if you don’t feel like writing your own ruleset there are premade rulesets available.
