Twitch.tv games

Was curious if there was a way to go about streaming your games via Twitch.tv and letting people type commands in the chat that then would be relayed into game play.

Very much like what this guy did using GM:

That’s a weird way to make multiplayer games, seems like completely unnecessary effort with a lot of limits.
Why just not create multiplayer game of IO type, such as: http://iogames.space and let people play directly?

The way I see it, is that you get people to play the game on twitch live, and allow the audience to directly chat and interact with each other via the twitch chat.

It’s also a creative way to have audience participation. The potential to make games like the HUNGER GAMES where you can have the ‘Streamer’ play the game, and have the audience influence it in creative ways.

Sure it may be clunky, but it’s an interesting dynamic that I think gamers, and their fans can enjoy.

I believe Amazon is already making a game like this.

It’s doable. Twitch Chat is just IRC and there’s bound to be a JS library for IRC around somewhere that you can integrate into PlayCanvas.

It’s less multiplayer and more like mass spectator participation that you sometimes see on TV game shows.

Yea totally! Here are a few links that I found, can you help me decipher?


https://www.npmjs.com/package/twitch-api

I simply googled ‘Twitch API Javascript’

Yea I had a fun idea where you can join a “Dance Club” where if you type !join

You would spawn a random Avatar, that then you can program to dance by typing !dance1, !dance2, etc.

I have a game already that it could be themed by>>

Press 123456789 to control the robot to the left, and num 123456789 to control the robot to the right. Basically make them play out dance animations.

IIRC, the Twitch API is not the same as the Twitch Chat. You are basically making a IRC Chat bot so you will be needing IRC client libraries/frameworks. (For the record, I’ve made a Twitch Chat only game last year with Unity).

So potentially any one of these frameworks:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=IRC+Javascript&oq=IRC+Javascript&aqs=chrome..69i57.4454j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=IRC+Javascript+bot+-node

You could also search for ‘Twitch Chat bot Javascript’ but they looked like most if not all would use Node.JS which may or may not be a deal breaker for you.

Once you have the IRC framework, you can have the game connect to the chat via: https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitch-irc

And from there, listen/send messages from/to the chat from/to the game.

Things to bear in mind:

  • Streamer to viewer latency is about 10 secs at best, up to a minute at worst
  • There are very few users for pure Twitch Chat games and 95% of them are playing Pokemon.
  • Your client source is public