It has been a past week of nerve wreckedness for Commit 2 the Bits. Despite that, we have another show under our belt! If you want to watch the show, you could fine it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/595045676.
Changes
This past week, we’ve been gathering the feedback from the playtest that we have done from last week, and we have been ramping up to prepare for our playtest this week!
We aimed to test out the toolkits that we developed, with some functionalities added this time around. We also chatted with our faculty advisor Brenda to develop an arc for the show that will both keep our audience engaged and have our improvisers warmed up to progress into more complicated games.
We ended up with an arc that began with a warm up game (Fortunately/Unfortunately), followed by a guessing game (Naive Expert), exaggeration game (Fish Guts), storytelling game (Conducted Story), then at last, competition type game (Good, Bad & Ugly) this time around.
One of the more prominent feedback that we got back last time was that the feed of our stream looked too much like a work conference call, which is sort of contradictory to the fun nature of our improv show. Therefore, this week, we implemented some overlay features for our show.
We also made some functional updates for our twitch improv bot. One change is that in game template, the host could simply click one of the games, and the game name as well as the introduction message will be outputted, which is much easier having to copy paste every time. The host could also access the script that controls this easily, so if a new game needs to be added or if a game description needs to be changed, they could modify the content in the Unity script.
Now that we don’t have to use the twitch client side to do the overlay as we did last time, you might notice that we still have a story board option in “switch game scenes”. This makes switch the story teller in the conducted story game as easy to control as last time.
We also added more proper branding images for our channel.
The Show
We brought in Parker, who is a second year of the program and one of the members of the original CTTB, as well as seasoned improvisers, including Carrie and Aaron who joined us last time, as well as Sam Turich. We were very excited to have them on the show!
We had lots of technical issues on our end. It took us a long time to set up everything in Streamlabs with adding everyone’s feed in (as it is the first time) with an hour to go on the show, and with Skype’s continuous problems, sometimes showing no video feed from the actors in our Twitch feed, despite the actors having their cameras on. This time around, we also experienced more lag on our show, as it felt like the suggestions took quite a while to trickle in, which is something that will factor more consideration in our next show.
Despite all the difficulties, we ended up having 41 unique viewers joining us, which was really awesome! The show lasted about 30 minutes with the five games that we prepared. Lots of audience members tried to make suggestions and be part of a show.
Feedback / What we will work on
We have used the show as a big chunk of what our feedback for softs (like an ETC wide beta opening event – which will be next week) will be based on. We are hoping that we will get valuable feedback in softs. Meanwhile, below are some feedback that we got through the google form that we sent out.
Something that we have been considering is introducing a laughter mechanism into the show. For a while, this is something that we felt like was simply hard to recreate on an online atmosphere. We have considered options of having the audience record their own laugh and uploading it, but felt like filtering through those for potentially offensive content was too much work. Due to the complexity of the problem, we never really thought about the possibility of doing so. In the more recent shows, however, it was pointed out that sometimes, the show felt dry without the laughter element. What we have decided to experiment is to use a laugh track available to us through an audio effect library on randon. The host will trigger the laugh button if she finds something is funny. We’ll see if that will help with this – there is absolutely no way of knowing before trying it out!
It was also pointed out that there is a lack of interaction between the audience and the actors. This time around, we are thinking that we might give the actors the choice to read off and react to some of the comments that the audiences have gave in chat (one other thing that was unclear is if the actors will be able to see the chat). We are also thinking of maybe doing a Q&A session.
We will also introduce some new games this time around and test out the types of games that could work. We’re very excited about this next show, as we are growing more comfortable with doing this with the professional improvisers.
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