Streaming Space Hulk live

[JeffTibbetts]

I have no idea where to put this, so I guess it's going in this forum... Mods, if you think it should be somewhere else, feel free to move it.

 

I decided to try streaming some live Space Hulk on the Twitch.tv service. If you're not familiar, it's used almost exclusively by video gamers, and next gen systems make it really easy to show people what you're playing. Seems silly? Well, I've watched a couple of my IRL friends on it, and it's not that different from when you may have had a buddy hanging out on your couch while you played a game. It's about the same thing because of the chat room on the video. 

 

At any rate, I really did it to give my fiancé and I more of an incentive to play, because frankly there just aren't that many people doing board games on the service. 

 

If you're interested, or if you use Twitch anyway, you should go and follow me so you can be notified when we play again. I've also uploaded the two games we played to YouTube if you prefer to watch them there. We're just working out the setup, but there's a nice overhead cam and then another so you can see as we're playing. I want to get a dice cam set up, but I can't seem to get the other webcams working yet.

 

It was pretty fun to do, and I plan to broadcast other games down the road as well as a decent amount of Space Hulk. Both times I had people watching the game who weren't familiar with it, so I was trying to explain the rules intermittently as we did stuff.

 

Here are the links:  

http://www.twitch.tv/jefftibbetts  <-- My Twitch channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjOf4EkDGMHyevM8l6qERZg  <-- YouTube channel with the two games separated out.

[Sheesh Mode]

Give us some more advanced notice in the future. I would have added my thoughts. Interesting game. 

[JeffTibbetts]

Oh, thanks! I'll try to chat with the miss and see when we're up next. I've got a bit of a bug so I'm not sure, but I wouldn't mind playing tomorrow.

[Sheesh Mode]

Some suggestions, bring the camera facing lengthwise close to the table, or find a way to increase the resolution. Furthermore, adjust the birds-eye-view to incorporate the entire map a little more and place the counter table so that the viewer can see it right-side up. It gives us a better view of the entire scene. 

[JeffTibbetts]

Those are all good points. Great idea about the turn counter! I didn't even think about that.

 

I set the side camera back that far so you can see the players a little bit. Seems to add context. You think it'd be better as just a different map angle? As for the birds-eye, we've been able to up the resolution a little bit but it's still not great. Part of the reason for that is the fact that it's downscaled a lot for streaming. Last time, though, I recorded on my desktop as well as streaming it, so maybe I can go in and do a YouTube edit with a little better res. The cam software only supports zoom levels at full increments, so it's normal size or double. Depending on the map size, double might be okay, but otherwise I just have to use the software to zoom in and you lose resolution fast that way. 

 

What I'd love to set up is a dice cam, so we can show the viewers what we're rolling. I talked to the OBS and Apple tech peeps, and it turns out once again I need to pay for real software if I want to do that. 

 

EDIT: I think we're probably going to stream tonight, by the way. I'm not feeling the best, but it's pretty low-impact so I should be okay. We're shooting for around 8 Central DST, so in a few hours. If you subscribe to our Twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/jefftibbetts/) you can set up notifications to see when we're live. I almost always Tweet as well. Find me there: @linguartisan