Jun 5

Jun 5 Reflections: My First 4 Months on Twitch

My first 4 months back on Twitch

In 2024 I made a goal to restart my Twitch stream, and to give streaming and making video game friends an earnest, new effort.

First, some basic stats. In four months (I didn’t start until February, so it’s February 2024 - May 2024) I streamed 17 times. I was live for a bit over 64 hours. It’s around 3 hours and 45 minutes per live stream.

Of these 17 streams, the first 15 were done using a method I outlined in a previous post called “The Rotation”. After these 15 streams, I took three weeks off and changed the channel’s direction. Following the three week break, I have done two streams which constitute the start of a new, more competitive era.

The First 15 Streams - “The Rotation”

So when I returned to Twitch this year, I conceptualized an idea meant to guide the stream’s direction. I called it The Rotation. The idea was each stream I would speedrun each game in The Rotation from beginning to end with no resets. By the time my 15th stream ended, I was speedrunning a rotation of four games with a total playtime of close to four hours (hence the average time per stream).

I kept track of the times in a spreadsheet and looked forward to tracking my progress over time, while also enjoying the ability to change it up and play multiple games at once for variety.

This idea seemed solid to me on paper, but there is simply no substitute for real life experience. Living through and actually executing my idea of The Rotation exposed the flaws that the idea has as time went on.

Reflecting back, I see a disconnect between what I thought would happen and what happened. What I thought was, ‘I will play each of my four games once a week on stream. I’ll practice the rest of the week, and come back and do it again. I will slowly but surely get better in all the games over time.”

For me, the sentiment above started to no longer hold true as my standards for play went up. By the end of my 15th stream, I could feel the lack of focus in my play. There were certain tricks that, unless I practiced the trick earlier the same day, I would miss regularly. These are tricks with no knowledge gap on my part. These are tricks I know exactly how to do.

I noticed the positive effects of ‘warming up’ a trick, and noticed the immediate decline in my success rate in hard tricks if I took a trick out of my ‘keep it warm’ rotation. I started to run out of practice time, and my runs stopped climbing the leaderboards. Once I stopped climbing the leaderboards, I felt the dopamine stop flowing in. But wait, when did mclepke start to care about being a try-hard and climbing the leaderboards? That’s why we need this next section.

A Hard Pause so we can Praise The Rotation

You’ve probably gotten the sense that this post is about how I started doing The Rotation and eventually stopped doing it in favor of something better. That is indeed the basic plotline. There’s an undercurrent, however. That undercurrent is that I have started giving an honest effort to using discord, and to socializing with other smaller Twitch streamers.

If you don’t know what discord is but you use slack, then just think of it as slack with a video game focus. if you don’t use slack or discord then idk it’s just a social media platform. I have had an account since I first started streaming in 2016, but I’ve never heavily used it.

This go-round, in addition to streaming on Twitch, I wanted to make an effort to seek out other small streamers and to try and meet people. I’ve successfully done a bunch of that - I’ve met some really cool people and even made some friends over the last four months.

This is why it’s imperative to pause and give The Rotation the props it deserves. Just getting out and getting started is a humongous part of the battle. Those 15 streams got me back out with my feet on the Twitch pavement, and have set a lot of things in motion that are causing its replacement.

Now that I know some people in this space and regularly socialize and communicate with them, I don’t feel as much of a need to stream. By the end of my 15 rotation streams, I already felt like part of a few online communities, so firing the SNES up and producing a show that is 99% similar to last week’s episode just didn’t seem worthwhile to me. That’s a lesson of experience. In my head, the hanging out was going to be done while I was streaming.

It was also unforeseen to me the new appeal that competing would have once I was more involved in these communities. I had gotten so burnt out on trying to improve my times in the past, but I have a new energy for it now because it is contributing to my social identity and I’m socially active with that identity. You know? I also feel like if I’m going to stream, I may as well have something worth streaming. We’re all busy.

So shoutouts to The Rotation. I think you aren’t the long-term concept for me, but I appreciate that you helped get me out there. Getting started is hard AF so whatever gets the ball rolling is worth applauding to me.

The Ninja Turtles Hyperbaric Chamber

One of the streamers I met over the past four months once commented that I had retreated into the Ninja Turtles Hyperbaric Chamber. I found it really funny and that name has definitely stuck in my head.

This is in reference to what happened immediately after the 15 streams of The Rotation covered above. The Rotation got me out there, and I started socializing more. Simultaneously, by stream 15, my PBs (personal best times) are starting to flatline, as I feel the effects of running four games at once. Double simultaneously, I’m feeling more motivated to actually get PBs, because I am more active in these speedrunning communities now, and so the competition feels more good-natured, tied to my identity, and just is overall more-rewarding.

I reflect and think, Rob. If we’re going to stream something, let’s get in the weeds and have it be something really cool. This begins a three-week period where I didn’t stream at all, but instead spent all of the time I usually dedicate to speedrunning to grinding Ninja Turtles 4: Turtles in Time. While playing the rotation, Turtles in Time was one of the four games, and I have developed quite a fondness for it. I decide to zero in on it.

For perspective, when I was playing four games at once, the total runtime of my four games was close to four hours. That means I was learning four hours worth of gameplay footage that I was performing live. The world record for Ninja Turtles 4 is under 19 minutes long. This was a massive change in the scope of my focus.

So for three weeks, I spend some time each day playing Ninja Turtles 4. Three weeks later, I returned and posted a time good enough to crack the top 10:

This then started a new wave of socializing - I joined the Ninja Turtles discord, got to talk to the person who has the current world record, and even learned some new strategies from the veterans of the server. As I become more involved in the community, as mentioned, I feel more motivated to keep digging into this Ninja Turtles run.

New Update Schedule

I do not have a set streaming schedule. I try to bring real skill improvement to each stream, streaming less often, but having a high chance of climbing the leaderboards each time out. My goal is to go live once a week.

I am also going to start trying to make game dev related posts here again soon!

Have a great day <3