For Want of a Streamer

Well, February didn't really have any meaningful posts of note since I spent most of the time jotting ideas and working on shading the Aozora group art. Progress has been steady but February has left me with "I want winter to end already" thoughts more times than I'd like to admit and there's still a meaty to-do list I have to attend to, which is hard when you've been struggling with motivation.

After deciding to get my streaming fix with different streamers following Vinesauce's break/hiatus in mid 2021, I ended up catching onto a bunch of them and seeing just how vast the world of videogaming streaming was. This included a group of streamers from New York City that I met in 2018 and two big content creators in the form of Gamescage and Maximilian Dood.

To keep a long story short, experiencing all these other streams has made me further consider attempting the hobby myself at some point in the future. Mostly since I haven’t had much of the incentive to game as much as I once did, and the pandemic and the resulting lack of conventions and other public events has made me crave some form of social interaction where I can communicate through voice while showing off the games I love, including the overly obscure ones you wouldn’t see in a typical stream. Art progress, unfortunately, would all have to be off stream as I work far, far too slowly and sparingly compared to other artists and my previous attempts at art streams on Picarto never worked out in a way I’d like.

Now, this won’t be a venture that I plan to jump straight into, as there are many other things still on the schedule that are higher on the priority chart (besides artwork). I’ll likely give a general update on the state of the agenda later on but for now we’ll focus no the one thing that would drive the streams: my computer. While I originally got the computer for Christmas 2010 then had it drastically upgraded five years later with a new shell for my birthday in June 2015, there have been no upgrades (or fixes) to the machine since and it is still running Windows 7. Now you may be wondering, why didn’t I update it? Well, if you look closer at the date I had the computer initially upgraded in, it was still within the lifespan of the controversial Windows 8, and naturally I was skeptical about upgrading to Windows 10 as PC games and programs have a horrible rep of having poor compatibility with newer machines. With Windows 11 now being the current OS, I figured the best time to upgrade would be now-ish so my PC is better equipped to handle more intensive graphics and specs so at least a few more years.

After the lengthy and rather expensive endeavor of trying to find a good graphics card in the year 2022, will I be streaming then? Likely not right away, as I also need to evaluate and ask my friends on what I can do to improve the quality and experiences of the streams as well as combat potential spambots. Going off of personal preferences, these are what I’m considering:

• A full overlay, which changes color each month to a different palette and (maybe) pattern.
• “Starting soon”, “BRB”, and “Stream offline” splash screens used in their appropriate contexts.
• No lengthy stream intro. Some online games might begin as "pre-streams" to give people a chance to populate servers and warm up before the real stream begins with voiceovers. 
• One or two games per stream, to prevent constant jumping between games that can become monotonous the more it happens before giving a game a chance to show everything it’s got. There would be exceptions, but only if a game, or two games, would be too short or too long for one stream.
• If the game is too long for one stream, it’ll bleed into multiple streams and get an additional part the following week.
• Games will be played beforehand to at least get a basic grasp of how they work and learn the ins and outs of the controls.
• No live feed of the Twitch chat in the stream to future-proof spambots (as their messages still remain in the VODs even if the message is removed).
• Subscriptions, gifts, bit donations, and raids will appear on screen accompanied by a sound effect but will not be called out on screen to prevent distractions in games. They will also appear in a part of the stream that does not disrupt game footage.
• Custom emotes done from scratch (I’m an artist, after all!)
• Support for specific BetterTTV channel emotes to enable more free emotes for use in the chat.

Unlike most streams, the games I feature will be primarily dedicated to older, more obscure games with very little if no modern presence or relevance on Twitch that also work with my current setup and can be streamed. And just to ensure I don’t go “just savestate/rewind everything LUL” at the first opportunity, I have created some internal rules in play for various older games in regards to the use of emulator features, such as save states and rewinding if I intend on reaching the ending. Games recorded through a capture card, as well as older Windows games from the 90’s that don’t run well or can’t run properly on modern systems (disregarding DOS games thanks to DOSBox) will be looked into at a later date, since I’m not sure about installing a virtual machine without knowing how much I should devote to an operating system that’s over 20 years old.

I’ve also been eyeing up some better USB controllers to replace the shoddy third party 360 controllers I’ve used for ages, as well as a Stream Deck, which will only drive up the total cost of the equipment in a time where I can’t really afford to spend too much extra cash. And sure, I’ll admit I can play games decently on keyboard and mouse that aren’t first/third person shooters but depending on the genre (especially run and guns, shoot-em-ups, and some execution-heavy platformers) controllers will be mandatory. I can’t promise that controllers will make me play any better than I usually do, but we’ll see.

Anyways, I’ve been working on this post for long enough, I’ll catch you all later.