Last night I was making my usual rounds of various Twitch.TV streamers that I follow in an attempt to relax before bed. One of my favorite streamers was playing a new game I had not heard of before. Intrigued by this new title, I jumped into their channel to see what the new hotness that is Dye was all about.
Dye turns out to be a pretty interesting little game. It’s one of those difficult platformer games in the same vein as Super Meat Boy and I Wanna Be The Boshy. If pixel perfect jumps, spot-on timing, and countless deaths are not your thing, then this game is probably not going to float your boat. I don’t know that I’ll play the game, but it looks neat and it was made by just two people. Crazy, right?
As I’m watching the streamer struggle bus their way through the game, they made a comment about how the developers of the game were in the chat. I am not one to keep Twitch.TV chat open for reasons, but I figured it would be interesting to see how the developers interacted with chat. Ultimately, this lead to a long night of chatting when I should have been asleep. Yet, I actually learned a bit about what all goes into making a game. Even one that appears to be rather simple, yet is fairly complex.
This is why I enjoy Twitch.TV so much. When smaller games release, oftentimes the developers can be found on some stream talking about the game they just released into the wild. You get access to ask the developers what they were thinking when they went with a specific art style, or control scheme, or what made them want to make a game, or where you can obtain their totally chill original soundtrack. I’ve seen bigger developers attempt this same type of interaction, but those often devolve into vile and stupidity because chat just can’t enjoy video games.
This is not the first time I’ve witnessed this phenomena. I once caught the CEO of ROCKFISH Games sitting in a tiny stream in which the streamer was playing Everspace. They were very interactive with chat. What was really nice about this interaction is that at that time, the game was still in the beta stages. If you bought the game and sent the CEO a message with your order number, they would get you right into the beta without having to wait for weeks or months. I’m pretty sure they sold quite a few copies of the game just based on the almost instant beta access. Also, the game was totally worth it as it is a good bit of fun.
It is crazy at what all you can actually find on Twitch.TV now. Being able to interact with developers is still a fairly new thing, but one that I hope we continue to see happen more frequently. Twitch and chill?
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