Since streaming for a few months under FuzzyJCats, while learning how to improve, I never understood when people advise, "improve your stream content". What does stream content mean?
Especially, as you can see from my past stored broadcasts, I focus on talking to chat rather than gaming, and thought stream content was how to be more entertaining to your viewers. In which case, by improving stream content, I thought the advice meant that you need to be more entertaining, but again, that's a very vague notion.
For instance, what are the prescribed steps to being entertaining aside from having the requisite high energy and enthusiasm? Do you prepare topics to talk about, make up jokes before stream and the like?
Sifting through the advice to get more information, there's the very vague idea that stream content is just picking out the game you want to play. But, this is not quite the helpful advice I need, because of course, if you're going to stream games, you have to decide on which game you're going to stream!
Now that my goal is to truly enjoy the process of streaming (letting go of the notion of chasing viewer numbers), finally knowing AND feeling that deep down, I'm now focused on "gitting gud" with streaming, and of course being with my community.
I always love the challenges of improving myself as I find reaching goals very refreshing and satisfying. I think that's one of the reasons why video games are so addictive, because who doesn't want to rise to the challenge of fighting a seemingly impossible boss, staying up until 3 AM, until you beat him. And how satisfying that is when you do!
At any rate, with this new focus on one of the more important aspects of streaming ("gitting gud"), prior to my last broadcast, a light bulb went off, and I sort of got a sense of what stream content infers.
Stream content is not just thinking about what game you want to play, but how to present it in the most entertaining way. For one, we need to think about what parts of the game are the most intriguing, two what do you want to accomplish in the game, and three, how do you showcase that?
Interesting Game Content
Viewers most likely want to see the story and missions such as the cool boss fights, rather than the grinding aspects of the game such as inventory management, collecting resources, and watching me fight trash mobs hours and hours on end to level up.
Even though I love grinding, inventory management and the like, they may not be as exciting as fighting an epic Boss. An analogy is watching a football game. You want to rewind past the ads (organizing inventory) and watch the football action, preferably a touchdown (Boss fight).
Sometimes, though, I think it does help to show the UI of the game, customization, as well as any really cool quality of life experiences the game offers, such as Odyssey allowing you to turn down the frequency of repetitive music (thank you Ubisoft!).
What Do You Want To Accomplish?
Since I'm streaming Assassin's Creed Odyssey, there are so many things to do in this game, which was one of the astounding things about this game, so my main overarching goal is to show all these elements.
Especially, as you can see from my past stored broadcasts, I focus on talking to chat rather than gaming, and thought stream content was how to be more entertaining to your viewers. In which case, by improving stream content, I thought the advice meant that you need to be more entertaining, but again, that's a very vague notion.
For instance, what are the prescribed steps to being entertaining aside from having the requisite high energy and enthusiasm? Do you prepare topics to talk about, make up jokes before stream and the like?
Sifting through the advice to get more information, there's the very vague idea that stream content is just picking out the game you want to play. But, this is not quite the helpful advice I need, because of course, if you're going to stream games, you have to decide on which game you're going to stream!
Now that my goal is to truly enjoy the process of streaming (letting go of the notion of chasing viewer numbers), finally knowing AND feeling that deep down, I'm now focused on "gitting gud" with streaming, and of course being with my community.
I always love the challenges of improving myself as I find reaching goals very refreshing and satisfying. I think that's one of the reasons why video games are so addictive, because who doesn't want to rise to the challenge of fighting a seemingly impossible boss, staying up until 3 AM, until you beat him. And how satisfying that is when you do!
At any rate, with this new focus on one of the more important aspects of streaming ("gitting gud"), prior to my last broadcast, a light bulb went off, and I sort of got a sense of what stream content infers.
Stream content is not just thinking about what game you want to play, but how to present it in the most entertaining way. For one, we need to think about what parts of the game are the most intriguing, two what do you want to accomplish in the game, and three, how do you showcase that?
Interesting Game Content
Viewers most likely want to see the story and missions such as the cool boss fights, rather than the grinding aspects of the game such as inventory management, collecting resources, and watching me fight trash mobs hours and hours on end to level up.
Even though I love grinding, inventory management and the like, they may not be as exciting as fighting an epic Boss. An analogy is watching a football game. You want to rewind past the ads (organizing inventory) and watch the football action, preferably a touchdown (Boss fight).
Sometimes, though, I think it does help to show the UI of the game, customization, as well as any really cool quality of life experiences the game offers, such as Odyssey allowing you to turn down the frequency of repetitive music (thank you Ubisoft!).
What Do You Want To Accomplish?
Since I'm streaming Assassin's Creed Odyssey, there are so many things to do in this game, which was one of the astounding things about this game, so my main overarching goal is to show all these elements.
I want my viewers to see all the things this game offers, so they can get a good sense of the game. And, if they're on the fence of whether they should get the game, they can see if it's a game they'd like to play.
Therefore, I made a checklist of the pertinent gameplay elements, and my aim is to show at least one example of each. In other words, once the viewers get a sense of a bandit camp, there's no need to tackle bandit camps endlessly, and you can move onto one of many other things you can do in this game, such as puzzles.
Spoilers of a general list that I want to present so far:
Other things that another streamer may want to achieve are challenge runs, such as no-death runs. Quite a few streamers have gotten extremely creative about these challenge runs, like this Dark Souls 3 banana run!
But for mere mortals like me, coming up with a run of the mill objective like showcasing the diversity of Odyssey is a good starting point!
Showcasing by Prepping Pre-Stream
Odyssey is such a long and rich game that I already have 200 hrs. However, I'm only streaming 1 to 2 times a week for about 1 to 2 hrs each stream so it will take well over a year to finish the game if I don't prune content!
Realizing that streamlining is crucial, I then see where I am in the game, and determine what I want to accomplish for that stream.
For the last broadcast, I wanted to get my money back from Marcos, so my title reflects that purpose:
I then do some prep work pre-steam, such as opening up the map. This means going to all the question marks on the map, which then pop up to show if they're camps, quests and other markers, so that we can easily go to these locations during stream.
By opening up the map before stream, the viewer doesn't have to see us running back and forth to all these locations. Further, not knowing what's there, we want to avoid going to the wrong location to save time, so we can focus on the story and quests.
Another consideration is that if I'm on my way to a boss fight, and I notice I'm under-leveled and we don't want to keep fighting this same boss 100 times over until success, I can always level up before stream. Therefore, when stream starts, we're at the boss fight, ready to go!
In other words, you can easily plunge into your objective, without having your viewers suffer through the trek to get there.
In this specific example of Marcos, now prepped, I stream until we get our drachmae back from Marcos, and that took about 2 hrs or so. I was side-tracked due to all the missions in the game, but that's okay. At least, we have a general sense of what we want to do, and although we'll invariably be side tracked, this will also showcase the game.
The tricky part here is to come up with enough gaming that will span your entire stream. So if you're going to stream 4 hours, you may want to plan more of the interesting and complex missions to do, maybe planning on doing a few boss fights as part of your content.
This clearly assumes that you know the game already and know what it offers, and what the exciting quests are. But, even if you're streaming a game for the first-time, you can do some prep.
Looking back at my Borderlands 2 first-time walk-through experience, I know I have to be well-equipped to beat missions and chapters. Since I know that I'm a bit under-leveled, I recalled grinding a few areas before streaming to be able to tank through a story chapter or side mission.
While leveling up, I also got more resources along the way. Therefore, after this prep work is over, we can head to side or story missions for the stream, making sure the character is right near the start of the objective.
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| Exhibit A: One Twitch Tag is Farming |
If you're doing one of those ridiculously hard challenge runs like a no-death run, then clearly, you need to show the whole thing to "prove" you didn't die. But if you're a streamer who doesn't do such challenge runs, prep work can help.
In conclusion, I think this is what is meant by stream content. You figure out what goals you want to meet during stream, doing any necessary prep work before stream (if you have time), and what's the most entertaining way to present the game to your viewers.
If you're a Twitch streamer, does this make sense? Any other stream content considerations we should be thinking about would be much appreciated!
The How of Happiness Review
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