Tag Archives: twitch

New stories, new gigs!

Posted by aabicus on

Hi all! Been a while since I wrote on this blog, and lots of things have happened!

The funniest one has to be Flora’s brief limelight on reddit after I mentioned one of her stories in a discussion involving a certain BDSM fetish. I got flooded with messages from people wanting to read it, and overall a lot more conversation on the topic than I expected. (The story is the nudist colony one I mentioned a while ago btw). Well, some dude messaged me and paid me ½ cent/word to write another one starring his OC Spectra. So, if you wanted to read about a candystripe tigress with mind control powers, “What Happens in Legal…” has you covered! (This marks the third time I’ve been paid for erotic commissions, beginning with “Taming of the Revenue” back in 2015. I wonder what point I need to start considering this a side gig.)

Other exciting news, MasterClass has hired me back onto another upcoming class! I haven’t signed any NDAs, but I’m positive they don’t want me talking about the content so I’m keeping my trap shut. I’m just excited to work for them again, the Will Wright class was a great experience and I’ll be putting a lot of time into them the next few days. So don’t expect this blog to start being updated any faster than it currently is.

VGFAQ is going good, releasing videos at a steady rate. E3 is in a few days, that’s when I’m gonna kick things into high gear on that front. I’ve started publishing articles for the VGFAQ blog, which forced me to learn block-form WordPress, which was weird at first but it grew on me after a while. It gives you a lot less flexibility for your formatting, but it simplifies cookie-cutter article creation quite well, which is pretty much all I make for them anyway.

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Lookit my sexy Twitch channel wallpaper! I update the words/icons after every stream so my viewers know what/when the one will be. 

I have two subscribers on Twitch!!! This means I’ve made 5 whopping dollars as a streamer, which is actually really exciting because I’ve wanted to commit to streaming for years and am only now finally doing it. It’s really fulfilling to know that people enjoy my shoutcasts enough to throw Twitch Prime subs my way, and I’ve been streaming ARK and Overwatch on a semi-regular basis to try and keep my numbers up. (By all metrics I shouldn’t be streaming ARK, the Overwatch streams are the only ones that get any traction, but I enjoy ARK and it feels like a natural continuation of the YouTube series of mine and Asmund’s adventures. Plus it’s not like I’m anywhere close to the 75 viewers average needed to qualify for partnership. I haven’t even broken 30 viewers at any given second, much less for a 30-day average.) When life settles down somewhat, I fully plan to reapply for a job at Twitch. Previously they said no because I had no streaming experience, but next time around it’ll be another story!

Updates on Things

Posted by aabicus on

Sorry I haven’t posted recently, I’ve got so many different things I’m doing here and there.

1. New Emilena story! This one was started ages ago, but I finally finished the other 80%. It’s readable here and takes place directly after “Orphanage”, the story where she returned to her childhood orphanage and killed her old warden. In this story, she confesses to the murder and is incarcerated in an all-women’s prison. It explains why she’s no longer a police officer in the follow-up “private investigator” story, and it gives her the chance to butt heads with a bunch of characters she defeated from older stories, most of whom are excited for a chance to even the score.

2. I’ve added a number of categories to the Darwin’s Soldiers Wiki, including Destroyed objects, destroyed locations, books, and family trees. I dunno why, encyclopedic cataloging just relaxes me. Sometimes I wish we had an Into the Black wiki, and other times I thank god we don’t have one because there’s way too much content to even fathom starting now.

3. I’ve shoutcasted a ton of Overwatch matches on Twitch. Most are part of League Zero, but there’s also a fair amount of pick-up scrims I’ve been publishing on VGFAQ. I’ve really enjoyed making videos for that channel, since it gets way better traffic than the SPUF of Legend. Maybe it’s possible I should feel bad for letting my own channel grow stagnant while earning click revenue and a bunch of unearned views on someone else’s site, but the SPUF of Legend has almost completely lost its fanbase since I gave up on Payday videos so I don’t think anyone’s particularly sad. And I might make more videos every now and then, but right now I’m scrambling to keep up with the many videos I want to make for VGFAQ. I need to start on a video for Inside the Magic as well…

4. I have taken out two extensions on the eSports course for the sole reason that I need to finish that darn final essay. It’s not even particularly long but its got a lot of parts and I’ve constantly had more important things to worry about. But I really should button that up one of these days so I can take it off my mental checklist.

5. I haven’t had much time to game for fun, sadly. That kinda happens when its your job to play games for various sources of income. Pretty much my only guilty pleasure is ARK Survival Evolved, which is an awesome survival game and the only one I’ve ever heard of that remains fun whether you’re playing with 0 other people, 100 other people or any number in between. Personally, I don’t have the time or patience to deal with online idiots, so I play on a solo server with Sydney and most of our time is spent taming dinosaurs and creating Miasmata-style outposts throughout the map. You can see our complete idiotic adventures in this playlist, which is finally populated enough I feel okay letting people know about it.

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Look at how cool my bird is! She has ‘FEAR ME’ written across her wings!

Esports Week 7 – Casting the Clash for College Competition!

Posted by aabicus on

Prompt: Design a preparation worksheet for yourself. The worksheet should include a checklist of things that you need to have done before the actual broadcast; include timelines. It should include scouting reports, previous game analysis, predictions, and hot stats. Identify and research an issue in the assigned reading and in your independent reading. Feel free to consult and explore a wide variety of resources!

This preparation worksheet isn’t hypothetical, I’ve got a real tournament coming up I need to shoutcast! A fellow student has hooked me up with the Kilgore College 1v1 Overwatch Double-Elimination Tournament, which is going to require a number of preparations on my end.

The tournament is in just over a week. Here’s my worksheet checklist for things that need to be done by then:

1. The tournament’s going to be on Xbox, which I have literally never played in my life. In order to connect to the server, I’ll need an Xbox. Nathan says he can loan be his by Monday. There’s a series of sub-items on this bullet:

  • Setup the Xbox
  • Purchase and install Overwatch (currently 60% off!)
  • Hook up my Twitch to my Xbox
  • Hook my microphone/headset to the Xbox
  • Play Xbox Overwatch for a while and practice with the spectator controls.
  • Run a practice stream from the Xbox and ensure Twitch broadcasts are stored and accessible by computer (I’ll want to be able to upload the tournament VOD to Youtube for posterity)

2. I’m also not that familiar with Overwatch 1v1.

  •  See if I can find some other shoutcasts online of the gamemode (I’ve never casted anything but classic 6v6)
  • Watch some tutorial/”How to win” guides for the gamemode
  • Watch some VODs of grandmaster-level 1v1 play so I can intelligently mention high-level strats and (if not forced-class) note the frequency each hero is played.

3. I need to learn some info from the tournament. Preferably what heroes are available, what map pool we’ll be using, and what ruleset (there are 2 official 1v1 game modes, and they may be using something custom). This will help me narrow down what elements I need to learn more about so I can cast intelligently. (For once I don’t need to research teams or players, since these are high-schoolers with no prior Overwatch careers)

4. Once these bits have happened (which essentially means I’m prepared for the tournament) it’s time for marketing.

  • Leave a hole in my YouTube publishing schedule for the VOD to go live
  • Change my Twitch banners to reflect the tournament
  • Inform my Twitter, YouTube, and Daily Esports audiences when and where the event will be happening

 

Esports Week 6 – An Article About Articles

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Prompt: Find and review three esports related articles produced from teams and breakdown the purpose of the article, how the author address their topic, what makes it a catchy article, and how they engage the fan. Then write three (less than 750 words) articles on your chosen esports topic as if you were writing for your team. Send your “best” or “favorite” article for review and evaluation, and in Peer Review, list reasons why you like your peers’ articles and what they could change. You will only post ONE of your articles that you will write for this week.

Article 1: Interview With Forge Arena Publisher Artur Minac, published 9/7/2018

I’m interviewing Oliver, CEO of Demise Esports, as one of my two interviews for the quarter, so I poked around his franchise’s site to see what sort of content they had. This article stuck out amongst a sea of more generic announcement/recap articles, so I checked it out in order to learn their goals in publishing it.

And…I’m still not sure. It’s a lengthy interview with one of the publishers of a 5v5 FPS I’ve never heard of, and most of the article is dedicated to Artur explaining what Forge Arena is, and how they’re hoping to make an esport out of it. Demise doesn’t have a Forge Arena team, so I can only assume they were considering/planning on one at the time and this article was a gateway introduction for their fans. I can’t think of any other scenario why this interview would exist. Only a single question mentions Demise, and if I were the editor I’d have cut it before the article went live (Interviewer asks Artur his favorite player from Demise, Artur replies he doesn’t have one because he’s never paid attention to them.) At minimum, remove the giant Sad Pepe Frog meme that calls attention to this moment of the franchise getting shot down, it’s terrible optics.

Article 2: Why ‘one-trick-player’ Specialists Ruin the Competitive Experience, published 10/11/2017

This one’s a little different as it’s Jake’s private blog (Jake is a DPS player and the face of the Houston Outlaws), but the Outlaws have a nonexistent internet presence so it (and Linkzr’s post-match MS Paint posters) are the only real internet presence the team has so they’re still treated with a level of representation. I love this blog because it’s so much more than just a mouthpiece for the Houston Outlaws; Jake writes long, passionate articles about Overwatch’s game design and development choices, the sort of thing you never see in a normal team blog. It shows that Jake didn’t stumble into the Overwatch League on accident; he’s put in the time to understand the game and its esports scene on a core level. Of course, it can also get away with a lot less muckwork because of its unofficial nature, not to mention because the Overwatch League has a webpage dedicated to each team that handles more typical news like signings and previews.

Article 3: San Francisco Shock Sign Striker, published 12/3/2018

And here’s an analysis of a more typical article, just because the last two were a bit unusual in design. This was published by NRG, one of those big names that has a major team for every big esport, and I suspect the brevity and tokenism of the article stem from how the fact that it needn’t worry about anything beyond simply existing. NRG doesn’t need to market themselves with this article, they have enough fans and impact that the esport community and third-party journalists are more than happy to shoulder the effort of spreading this story far and wide, speculating on the impact it’ll have and voicing opinions on the ramifications/intelligence of the signing. That last paragraph is straight-up copy-pasted from every other 1st-party article about the SF Shock, and otherwise the article is a mere six sentences long. Thesis statement, a clarifying sentence on Striker, an obligatory quote from the Head coach, and a conclusion sentence; couldn’t be more textbook if they tried.

And now for my article:

Recently, Primal announced that Enzo “WarKr0Zz” Conte has signed onto the team as a flex tank in time for the 2019 Fortnite Open Division. We took some time today to sit down with Enzo and chat about esports, his career, and his future:

Tell us about your background, and how you got into esports. 

I started playing esports when I was very young, maybe 9 or 10, for the Call of Duty games. I quickly fell in love with the spirit of competition, so when I came home after school I’d rush to the computer to try and improve my skill. At 16 I started to play Overwatch. When I reached Top 500 on ladder, a lot of teams contacted me and I ended up joining HuBesport. When I saw the cash prizes available in Fortnite, I started working hard in this new scene and have won several tournaments and cash prizes.

What are your training/practice methods for tournaments? How do you get ready? 

I have two major preparations when training for tournaments: Mentally, I try not to think about losing, and I make sure to spend time with my friends and family the day beforehand. All other days I’m training in Fortnite’s Creative Mode. I watch a lot of videos to learn new tricks and practice them in Creative Mode, especially the endgame because it’s the most difficult part, you always end with like 50 people in a zone smaller than a room.

I notice you stream as well as play competitively. How do you balance your time between streaming vs. participating in esports? 

The stream is a part of my training. I stream almost every time I train, because after the stream I can watch it again to see the mistakes I made. Also, it’s really cool to stream because you can share some moments with your viewers who saw you in a tournament.

Do you think streaming is a valuable resource for esport players to utilize? 

Streaming is a huge opportunity for professionals because you show everyone that you can regularly play at your level. And sometimes, when I do something good a viewer will clip it and share it on Twitter…so all the teams and community will see it.

You worked as a manager for Underrated from October 2017 to April 2018. How different was it to manage an esport team as opposed to simply play on it? 

When you are a player, the only thing you have to do is play and practice. When you are a manager, it’s more difficult, you have to personally know all the players on the team and how they work mentally. When I was a manager I regularly planned “scrims”, which is where you train with other teams. The whole organization of the team rides on your shoulders.

What advice do you have for others hoping to follow in your footsteps and break into esports?

Becoming an esport player is really difficult, you have to be really good from the beginning. After that it’s all about rhythm. Sometimes you’ll be playing for up to 12 hours a day but you can’t quit. I had to balance my practice routine with my studies, but it’s something that feels really rewarding when you stick it through to success.

Enzo streams regularly at https://www.twitch.tv/warkr0zz, and you’ll also see him on the island fighting for Primal when Open Division starts! For more information, visit PrimalGaming.com, and follow @PrimalEsportOrg on Twitter.

eSports Week 1: Three Potential Twitch Competitors

Posted by aabicus on

Can’t wait to see if the prof actually approves that third one as a focus of study

Prompt: Identify three gaming infrastructures (i.e. graphics, streaming services, game development, etc) and report how they will affect change and describe their impact. Give a projection for how you think the esports industry will look like in 5 years. Additionally, give an overview of most popular games in each game category and what has lead to their popularity, (200-700 words). Post this summary in SMWW e-Arena in the Week One Discussion Board by Friday. Have some fun with the discussion of this week’s theme.

I predict rapid alterations in what platforms are the leading voices in eSports. Twitch has been the leading platform for the last five years, since Twitch Plays Pokemon brought them into the public focus, but I’ve noticed that when it comes to online trends, there’s always an “early adapter” who falls out of focus as soon as things hit mainstream. It happened when Discord replaced Mumble/Skype, it happened when Facebook replaced MySpace, and it happened when Google replaced Yahoo. With eSports on the verge of going mainstream, this is Twitch’s moment to seize history, but I want to explore their biggest competitors, the companies I think most likely to possibly seize their crown.

(One supplementary note: I firmly believe that OWL-style professional leagues are the future of eSports, as opposed to CS:GO-style leagues composed of passionate communities and grassroots origins. Traditional sports have shown that centralized, corporate-style orgs are both profitable and popular, and the increased control by a single entity allows unprecedented levels of organization and unity in branding. This is one reason I think Twitch has the potential to be replaced; corporate leagues will have the resources and cohesion to abandon one streaming platform for another if the winds shift.)

While Twitch is currently the leader in eSport-related streaming, I’m personally very interested in YouTube and whether it will be able to nudge its way into Twitch’s domain. Both companies have been steadily increasing their competing services for a while (Twitch now allows permanent video storage via the Highlight feature, and YouTube is aggressively promoting its streaming service) and if YouTube can get their act together I think they have several important selling points that can give them the edge over Twitch, namely brand recognition and ease of video storage in volume. Their biggest downside is their draconic copyright policies that are turning content creators off the platform. This largely turns away any potential eSport communities that aren’t corporate-controlled, like the Overwatch League, but I’ve already mentioned I think OWL-style leagues are the future so YouTube can potentially overcome these issues.

Second, I’d like to explore Mixer, the other major Twitch competitor. Mixer has a couple perks in its court: Microsoft money, crowdplay integration, and Hypezone technology. The second one is the most important; Mixer’s main claim to fame is that it supports HTML plugins that allow the viewing audience to directly involve themselves in the stream. For example, they can vote directly for events to happen in-game, or randomly-selected opt-in viewers can play as characters in supported titles. This offers a level of interactivity that no other streaming platform can offer, and has huge potential for gambling/fantasy circuits. The big question is (a) Does Microsoft have the guts to make themselves the fantasy eSports site of choice and (b) will governments allow them to do so or will they condone the practice as underage gambling, similar to how microtransaction loot boxes have been banned in Belgium.

Third (as silly as this sounds), I want to examine YouPorn, not as a competitor to Twitch but as a peripheral provider who specializes in adult leagues. This largely stems from my belief that OWL-style leagues are the future, and most corporations want to keep a family-friendly appearance since underage gamers are a huge market for eSport-style games. Most of the biggest names in eSports (Blizzard, Riot, Twitch, Valve) insist on keeping things family friendly. YouPorn, in contrast, has sponsored NSFW tournaments and fielded prize-winning professional teams since 2014. With modern eSports unanimously embracing the childsafe experience, a counterpart adult league is an untapped market and YouPorn seems to be the only website attempting to claim it.

I’d go into more detail, but the prompt said to keep our post to under 700 words. If anyone wants further justification or commentary on these three sites of choice, please let me know! I have a lot to say on all three, and hope to be able to do so in future posts.

Streaming and Streaking

Posted by aabicus on

Lot of cool things happened in various directions, so I thought I’d give a little compilation for the record.

First, I shoutcasted a Forzebreak tournament and it went really well!

The Forzebreak team was really appreciative, we got almost 50 people watching on Twitch because various students tweeted their friends, and I get to add another game to my shoutcasting portfolio. I didn’t do half bad considering they literally didn’t have an observer mode, forcing me to cast the game from the sole perspective of Player 4, but overall it was great practice for the upcoming tournament this Friday for Major League Magic.

Forzebreak is lucky they had their tournament when they did, because my YouTube channel recently experienced something of a boon. Two weeks ago, I released yet another video, this time a lightning-fast chronicle of The Only 5 Weapons Worth Using in Payday 2, and for some reason people really, really liked it. I gained 1800 views, 180 thumbs-up and 40 new subscribers overnight, and to capitalize on this new audience I accelerated my videography pace to twice a week. I also nailed down an exact schedule; I’m now releasing a new video every Tuesday and Friday, each one under two minutes and chronicling a top 5 list in Payday 2. I’ve also started promoting my videos on Twitter, Steam, and reddit, and so far its resulted in my videos gaining far more viewers than I’m used to. Overkill contacted me on Discord and added me to their private content-creators channel, where I’m currently talking to other Payday 2 videographers in the hopes of maybe convincing one of them to do a crossover with me. I’ll keep you posted.

In other news, I ran Bay to Breakers naked yesterday, and holy god am I exhausted. I’d only started running about a week prior, and I hadn’t run nearly as far as the 7.5 miles in Bay to Breakers, but I actually completed the marathon without stopping. Sure, there were many times I downgraded from a jog to a basic walk, but I never fully stopped, and completed the marathon in about 2 hours. Afterwards, I followed a bunch of people to the Uber/Lyft pickup point, where my phone cheerfully informed me it would be $200 to drive home. Not even remotely interested in paying that much (and woefully underinformed as to how the Bart works; most people I’ve spoken to said I should have used it to leave the city), I chose to queue up the route home via walking, then just start hiking. I didn’t expect to finish the trip (it was a 14.5 hour walk according to Google Maps), but I knew every step I took would decrease the cost of my Uber, especially as the hours ticked by and everybody else went home and the surge ended. In the end, I walked another 8 miles over the course of two hours, which adds up to a full marathon-length in total. But my Uber home was only $30, so I’m not complaining. I’m not leaving my room today for anything, though, my legs are sore beyond belief.

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In order to keep this post at least somewhat programming-focused, I also finished another homework assignment for ProcGen class. This one used a new program called Substance Designer, which created textures with stuff like normals, materials, and roughs. The overall UI was like, connecting squares of data with little lines, which took some understanding but was overall really understandable. I feel motivated to get better with Substance Designer because textures are the sort of thing I don’t have much experience creating, and I don’t like using other people’s content, so it’s something I’ll need to learn if I ever hope to move into the 3D space.

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We had to create a rusty metal and a more creative texture. Mine was like golden liquid with a blue moss on top, I guess. Reminds me of UCSB’s colors.

Day 61 and 62

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Sorry forgot to post yesterday! Today our 1000th article went live on the Daily SPUF, and Medic and I have been scrambling to get everything done on that front.

Here’s our 24-hour checklist we got COMPLETELY done:

*Daily SPUF 1000th article went live, as did my first video, cross-posted to Reddit
*Daily SPUF now has a Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr that all auto-update everytime we post a new article.
*For tomorrow, I’m gonna write a bunch of tweets that link back to previous Daily SPUF articles and autopost every day, maybe twice a day.
* Twitch account touched up, microphones and speakers are all fixed, somehow it took me two months to do that. Now i can voice chat in games and Skype calls!
*and for the hell of it, two completely dumb little videos posted to my youtube account

Big social media push happening, and its just gonna keep on giving 😀 But I still found time to get some Unity done. Yesterday’s video was on randomizing the guesses so it’s not so predictable in its queries, and today was a one-page script letting me download the sample text for what we’ve done so far. I never have counted that before, but with so much else on my plate I’m letting it slide. Tomorrow we finish off Course 4 and move onto Course 5, Block Breaker! We’re getting dangerously close to the level of experience I need to start making marketable Unity games for Facebook/mobile apps.