With everyone cooped up, a lot more people have been tuning in to Twitch to satisfy their entertainment cravings. In a report by Streamlabs, between February and March of this year, hours watched on Twitch increased by over 23%, as well as a 17% increase from the previous quarter.
One of the things that was discussed during the prototyping phase of DepowerBall was that we wanted to put streamers first and make it accessible to them. Provide streamers features that will allow them to interact more closely with their audience. This is not the first time that this has been done.
There have been games that have done this kind of thing before. One of the earliest use cases was Twitch Plays Pokemon, where a streamer allowed its audience to fully control a game of Pokemon. One of my favourite cases was Clustertruck, where developers built a backdoor into the game that would allow them to modify a game live while a person was streaming (like changing the gravity or he colour of the trucks).
So we decided to do it as well.
In DepowerBall, one of the first features that we put into place was the ability to connect the game to Twitch. One of the game’s features is that players can vote to take away another player’s powers. But now, streamers can put that power in the hands of their audience. As development continues, there will be more features added to spice things up even more.
This past week, we put the first feature through it’s paces. And it worked out gloriously. If you have the time, feel free to skim the full stream. Eventually we’ll be putting up highlights to make the content more easily consumable. We were able to create online gameplay through the power of Parsec, so shoutouts to them as well.
What’s next? A few things.
First, we will be continuing community streams, with the next one being Thursday, April 23rd at 7:30 pm at twitch.tv/megapower_games.
Second, as we get closer to release we will need streamers that would be interested in helping us out. So if you’re a regular streamer with a dedicated, fun, audience please reach out to us at contactmegapowergames@gmail.com.
And third, if you haven’t already: please wishlist the game on Steam to receive further updates as they come!
Until next time.
– MPG
Mega Power Games 