Building Friendship & Twitch stream 2.0
What’s up everyone! It’s been quite a while since the last blog post, so we have a lot of ground to cover today.
Sections of this Post
Updates on the game
Introduction to my new Twitch stream
Updates on the Game
I’ve now been working on this game for about a year. The start of 2023 is when I shifted focus from working on an action game to working on a jrpg. Looking back on the year, I can see the foundations of a video game. I have a basic main menu, textboxes that gradually scroll and make sounds, the ability to check things in the environment and talk to NPCs.
We also have some good structural things built that will help the project scale. We have a JSON-based text storage system well-situated for storing a game’s worth of text. I have a signal bus built to manage the larger number of signals we’ll be sending in an actual game, vs. the ad-hoc signal connecting you might do in a smaller demo. I have a dialogue manager in the code that is similarly geared toward being an important player in a larger project. I have a git repository backing up the project, and learned enough git command line stuff to not fuck it up.
At some point late in 2023, this strong foundation made me decide to turn my attention toward building out the main town in the game - Friendship. Named after the neighborhood in Pittsburgh I live in, Friendship is where most of the game will take place. You will get to know all the neighborhood shops and the people who run them over the course of the game.
So with all of that said, right now, I’m in a mode where I’m working on pixel art all the time. I’m trying to build out this town of Friendship. Similar to how 2023 involved a lot of improving my programming skills to get the foundation built, this era of development I’m in right now will involve improving my pixel art skills.
Here are the pieces I have so far, with some notes:
Friendship High - loosely based on what my high school in Massachusetts looked like. The main character is not a student, but the school will nonetheless be a notable spot in town. To the right you can see the gymnasium, which will be an enterable building. I started decorating the gym with some sports balls. You can also see a sign indicating that the football field is on the screen to our left. I intend for the town to have a humorous obsession with gridiron football, parodying some of what I see in real life.
You can also see that there is a stone path leading behind the school. Walking into that area will load a new screen called “The BP”, which stands for the back parking lot. My high school had premier parking spots at the front of the school that would fill up early in the morning, and then a larger back parking lot that was a further walk from the school for the stragglers. I was a daily parker in the BP my senior year. I’m picturing this area as a seedy area where kids are smoking pot or something.
The Co-op - The Co-op I have the fondest memories of in my lifetime was called Harvest, in Central Square, Cambridge. I think Harvest still exists, since the main location was in JP, but the Central Square location that I visited hundreds of times is not. I chose a wooden sign and flowers to decorate the building because it seemed to fit the vibe of a co-op, at least in my mind.
Also note that all of these pieces are in progress. This building is far from finalized, but this is where it’s at right now.
Coffee Shop - first draft of the coffee shop building’s golden tea kettle, which sits on top of it as a decoration. This is based on a coffee shop in Boston that has a similar adornment (though, it’s sadly a Starbucks today. It had been a tea shop prior).
Friendship Junction - Initial mockup of the main train station serving the town. Still in early stages.
Bowling Alley, Pizza Shop, Ice Cream Parlor - some partial mockups of other shops in town.
Bowling Alley Interior - my vision for the building interiors isn’t that you can walk around once you go inside. Instead, I imagine that once you walk in, you enter into a dialogue with the whoever is running the store. The dialogue will feature large portraits of your character and the person that you’re talking to, which will cover a lot of the screen. So this piece above would just be the background that is behind the portraits while the conversation is taking place.
This is a long way from being finalized, and might conceptually change in the future, but this is where my thinking is at with building interiors right now.
And that brings you roughly up to date. My plans for the immediate future are simply to continue building out the town, and continue trying to improve the quality of my art work.
Introduction to my Twitch Stream
I think we’ve all had a few scuffles with Krang. Also see the bottom of the post for close-ups of the pixel art shown behind me
At the start of 2023, I completely revamped my effort to make a video game. That we covered above. It was a great year, and my energy levels have been steadily increasing as I keep at the project. I couldn’t be happier with how it’s progressing. It’s still moving slowly…but I’m feeling like I’m at a new peace with it.
In a similar vein to the 2023 game dev relaunch, I had the start of 2024 in my mind as the right time to completely revamp my Twitch stream. I felt like I could add in this new project without losing steam with game dev. My ideal vision for myself is to work on making my own video game, while also speedrunning on Twitch.
The two projects complement each other well, I think. Streaming has the short-term positive feedback that the game dev lacks. I’m streaming and gaining views and followers and meeting new people. There’s an immediate satisfaction to it that long term game development features very little of. It’s also social in nature, which game development isn’t for me right now (maybe someday it will be).
Historically, on Twitch I have speedrun Donkey Kong Country 2, the 102% category. I’ve done this on and off since 2016. Analyzing this era of streams (all streams pre the 2024 revamp), I see a lot of fundamental aspects of the stream being at odds with each other.
I think my goals during that era were pretty much the same as my goals are today. I want to enjoy the process of streaming, and I want to try to attract a community of people that have a similar passion for retro video games that I do, and I want to hang out and have fun. The part that is different this time around is what I’m choosing to do on stream.
In my first era, I worked on speedrunning DKC2. This meant I was trying to beat DKC2 as quickly as I could, while playing the game with a timer running. This is a common Twitch stream format. Viewers will watch as the player makes attempts to improve their personal best time, and maybe even compete for the world record.
There’s more nuance to it than that, though. While some viewers will undoubtedly show up specifically to see a run that challenges the world record, the core of a streamer’s viewership are repeatedly drawn back to that stream because of the community that exists there. The personality of the streamer is a central contributor to this.
I think this starts to show the gap between what I want to achieve with Twitch streaming, and what I had been actually doing on Twitch. My personal goals have nothing to do with competition or world records or the art that is trying to save every single frame you possibly can in a game. I’m drawn to speedrunning because I enjoy knowing more about the games I love, and speedrunning is a vehicle to that end. I also like being around other people who enjoy knowing the minute details that govern the code of 30 year old video games. I’m legitimately interested in all of that.
So why did I spend so much time speedrunning in a ‘leaderboard-climbing’ sort of way? Honestly, I think it’s because so many other people do exactly that. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with being into that. I’ve realized over time though that it isn’t really my thing.
Okay, so if you’re changing this old formula, what are you changing it to? The new format of my stream is what I’m referring to as The Rotation. The concept is to pivot more toward breadth than depth. The Rotation is the current collection of games that I’m speedrunning. I will speedrun the games in order. Once you reach the end of the rotation, you start again. Games can be added or dropped from the rotation whenever.
Here’s a link to the spreadsheet that I’m using to compile the rotation data.
I landed on this idea for a variety of reasons. Here are some things I thought about:
This is a good format for a forever stream. One issue I always had in my old era of streaming was moving on from one game to the next. In fact, I never stopped playing DKC2. I always told myself I’d move on when I was happy with my time, but this is an example of the stream having mis-matched priorities. That sort of logic is what many a streamer do, but the competitive aspects of speedrunning never motivated me enough to keep the stream going.
This whole carefully documenting the entire history of The Rotation in a spreadsheet thing will be a really fun aspect of this project for me and viewers
One thing baked into this concept is that you never reset the game you’re playing. As in, if the game I’m currently playing is Mega Man 7, and I make a mistake in level 1, I’m not going to reset the game in hopes of getting a better run that doesn’t have that mistake in it. That’s not allowed. All the runs have to be done from beginning to end with no restarts. This is in contrast to a more competitive stream where the streamer’s #1 objective is to get the fastest time possible at all costs, which can result in frequent resetting and replaying of the early sections of the game. No resetting matches my vibes a lot more closely than resetting frequently and grinding for a better time
This format will be more fun and engaging the longer I do it, and the more consistently I do it. My prior format was designed to be most engaging the better I performed competitively. My strengths I think lie more in my consistency.
My goal is to stream every Thursday and Sunday. Thursday streams are ~1:30PM EST, and Sunday streams are around 9AM EST. If you want to catch one live, you can follow me on Twitch and turn notifications on. You can also go to my twitch profile and watch a video of a past broadcast anytime.
Lastly, at the beginning of this section, in the screenshot of my stream, you may have noticed that behind me on the live camera I have a bunch of pixel art perler projects on a retractable wooden thing that I’m using as a background. Here’s an up-close shot of the pieces for your viewing pleasure. Bonus points if you know what game each one is from! I made all of these in January, specifically for the purpose of livening up my stream background.
Thank you for reading! Have a great day!
