Month: March 2019

Interactive Streaming- Part 3

Having had such fun adding interactive capabilities into our drawing game, Interference,  and making Mixer’s first interactive live hosted quiz Zeitgeist – we thought that we should actually start to build Mixplay into our new games, from the beginning.

We came up with the idea for Rogue Drones during a Christmas party last year – around the time that drones were plaguing Gatwick airport and stopping flights. There seemed to be no technology available to stop these drones – so we came up with the idea of duct-taping a stun gun to our own drone and taking out the rogue drones with that!

We just thought it would be a good joke – but within a few days Nathan, our lead developer, had come up with a workable prototype which turned out to be fun to play! As we have progressed with it, we’ve been getting some very good feedback. This made us think that maybe we should make a fairly polished prototype and show it at London’s EGX-Rezzed show in April. We could get feedback and maybe get some interest from publishers and journalists.

We had the concepts in place, but in order for it to look as good as possible for Rezzed we engaged the services of an awesome graphic designer and Duck Games streamer, the Mixer-partnered BobDuckNWeave. He made us a fabulous new logo and did all the UI for the game.

So here is the premise:
You’re working at the airport and the day seems to be going well, when suddenly you spot something out of the corner of your eye! It that a… drone?
Panic ensues – you don’t want your airport shut down, but budget cuts mean you can’t afford any anti-drone tech. You’ll have to improvise: get your own drone out, duct-tape a stun gun to the top of it and use it to chase down and disable the rogue drones throughout the airport. Dodge planes, helicopters, the air traffic control tower and home in on the drones one by one. If you succeed, maybe you’ll make headlines in the newspapers!

The interactive part comes in the form of various buttons that viewers can use to create problems for the person playing. They can increase the wind speed to blow the drone off course, or reverse the controls so that up is down and vice versa. The stun gun can be disabled and the charge up slowed right down.

Each time a viewer uses one of the buttons – they get a shout out in the game in the form of a message on the screen from Air Traffic Control that might say something like “A Hacker calling themselves (name of viewer) has been messing with some of our radio signals” or “Storm (name of viewer) is approaching, don’t get blown off course!”

As he adds things into the game and fixes bugs, Nathan is livestreaming a dev update each week around 8pm on Wednesday evenings. You can check out the progress of the game and admire the new art on our Mixer channel: https://mixer.com/interference
If you miss one – you can see some on our YouTube channel too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ2byVNsaHQ

In our next blog I will be talking about exhibiting at EGX Rezzed 2019 – and the talk that we are going to give at the show: “Adventures in Livesteaming: A Developer’s Tale.

 

Interactive Streaming- Part 2

As part of the Interference birthday celebration last year we held a livestream party on our Mixer channel – and one of the things we tried was an interactive quiz. It was just about the game itself – as that is what we were celebrating – but it worked so well we thought “Why not hold a weekly pub quiz online – using Mixplay?”

Thus, Zeitgeist was born! It’s the pub quiz you can join in from your sofa – you don’t even have to take your slippers off!

Using the mighty power of Mixplay and Mixer’s sub-second latency we could ask general knowledge questions and give viewers 10 seconds to answer – so there was no chance for cheating by giving them time to google anything! If we had used any other streaming platform – where the delay can be 6-7 seconds – this would not have worked, as by the time they had read the question and answers they would have run out of time to press the correct answer.
Originally, we saw it as a way of marketing Interference – as the way we chose the topics for the 5 rounds of general knowledge was by picking our favourite 5 drawings from each week’s games. So if someone had drawn a particularly awesome seagull, for example, we might have a round on sea birds. Part of the fun during the quiz is the players guessing what the next round is about from the picture at the start!

So, the way it works is that we have 5 rounds of general knowledge – each with 5 questions. Each question is multiple choice – so you choose the correct answer (hopefully!) from four possible options. At the end of each round there is a leaderboard – and as we go through the rounds the scores are accumulated onto the main leaderboard – so we can see who has got the highest score so far.

It is hosted by myself and Nathan and we enjoy the interaction in the chat, the banter between the quizzers and the friendly competitiveness it fosters. We have got an audience of all ages – from all over the world, and we like to think that the quiz brings whole new audience to Mixer. It is pretty exciting most weeks as we quite often get to the final question to decide the winner. One week we even had a dead heat between two of the regulars. We think that it is the first live quiz on the Mixer platform.

We feel that there are a lot of people who would love to join an actual pub quiz – but can’t go out for various reasons (kids, disability, no friends available) so can join in from wherever they are from any device. Everyone loves a quiz but instead of watching The Chase or Who Wants to be a Millionaire and just shouting at the TV – you can actually take part. It’s like social television – what’s not to love?

To join in go to our Mixer channel at: https://mixer.com/interference

In our next blog post we’ll be talking about how we now build interactive features into our games from the start – rather than adding them in as an afterthought. We will show the example of our latest game in progress – Rogue Drones.

 

Interactive Streaming- Part 1

So, what have we been up to recently?

We’ve been getting into interactive streaming – one of this year’s major trends!

Thanks to our awesome Community Manager, Sarah Marie, who suggested streaming as the way to increase our discoverability, we have been trying out Mixer and using their Mixplay tools to let streamers and viewers interact in real time. With its sub-second latency it means viewers don’t just watch games in progress – they can actually join in and influence the gameplay. It is so much better than passive steaming as everyone feels more connected and involved.

For example, we first tried this out in our popular drawing game Interference (https://www.playinterference.com/) It was Halloween so we decided to add some tricks and treats to the live drawing stream that Sarah was doing each week. She was doing a session every Wednesday evening to show people how to play the game and how it works. Adding in ways for the viewers to interfere with what she was doing has made the stream even more popular!

Sarah enjoys the steaming much more too – in fact she says she doesn’t want to go back to playing Interference without Mixplay! It’s also great how people who enjoy watching the stream do go and play the actual game afterwards.

But, how does the Mixp;ay work?

To start with, you can decide which description she has to draw – by voting with the Mixplay buttons. Then, to hamper her progress, you can take away her colours – so she’s just left with a restricted or even just a monochrome palette or you can disable her undo button – so she cannot correct any mistakes. (She really hates that one!)

Nicer viewers can give her extra time (in Interference you only get 10 minutes to complete a drawing) or restore the colour palette if it’s been restricted in any way or even put back the undo button.

It makes things “interesting” for the streamer and fun for the viewers, because they can join in and enjoy the reactions of the streamer as they unexpectedly get helped or hampered during the play. It is certainly making a difference to her viewing figures!

If you’d like to see Sarah in action, and interact with her in real time – have a look at our Mixer channel on Wednesday evenings from 6.30pm – 8pm every week.

In our next blog post I will be talking about how we decided to use Mixer’s sub-second latency to host a real live pub quiz on Sunday nights!

EGX Video

At last we’ve edited the video of our EGX 2018 talk :If You Build it, They Will Come (Spoiler: They Won’t) a.k.a. A realists guide to game dev!

We had a great audience on the day – but if you missed it – have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhYgjoivcw&feature=youtu.be  

You’ll get some insights into what it is like to be a small indie games development company  and how you can try to overcome the challenges and make the most of the opportunities.