After our last Twitch Playlets and work on polishing the main game experience, we returned this week to the Twitch experience.
We’ve done a few tweaks already: we doubled the Input phase time to reduce conflicting input / output phases, and made the in chat messages clearer.
Another thing we noticed is that the game was fun – when we were on the chat directing players. When players wandered into the chat to play, they would leave quickly. So while we have decided to keep our Twitch v. Twitch model, we are moving to a more event based, broadcaster hosted game.
Finally, after much discussion, we’ve decided to pursue a new avenue for allowing users to play: a web App that provides Real Time Feedback, similar to what Streamline is doing.
We are building the App in NodeJS. The page embeds the Twitch Video and Chat. The app connects to IRC and uses messages to determine the state of the game. Then using the Twitch API’s latency property, we can calculate the amount of delay the video has, and update text in the app accordingly.
In addition, the web app will allow users to input the commands into the app according to
Admittingly, this is an ambitious piece to take on this late, but we realized how important improving the usability of the Twitch gameplay is.