TwitchCon 2019 Developer Keynote: Developing Multiplayer Entertainment
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TwitchCon 2019 | San Diego, CA | Sept. 27th 2019 https://www.twitchcon.com/schedule/developing-multiplayer-entertainment The Twitch Developer team will present the future of our developer products and discuss what we’ve learned. You will also hear from developers who have pushed the envelope as to what is possible on Twitch. This is just my portion of the talk, it doesn't include Twitch's portion or the other two developers who spoke during the keynote. Enjoy and by all means reach out if you have questions and/or feedback! I will share the video as well and link here as well if I can find it.
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TwitchCon 2019 Developer Keynote: Developing Multiplayer Entertainment
- 1. Scott Velasquez – Online & Social Product Owner
- 2. Little Bit About Me
- 4. Target Experience • Passive Information Vault Hunter Profile Inventory Skills Guardian Rank Game Settings • Interactive Events Rare Chest Event Piñata Event Badass Event • Emphasis on maintaining the look and feel of Borderlands
- 5. Vault Hunter Profile • Overview similar to profile cards you’ll see in-game on the Roster screen • Character and Level • Guardian Rank • Game Settings Difficulty Loot Mode Playthrough Mayhem Mode • Inventory • Skill Build
- 6. Rare Chest Event • Each viewer has 25% chance to win • Winners choose item from streamer’s chest • Item then sent to winner’s in- game mail • If viewer doesn’t own game, but has SHiFT account, items can be redeemed once our game is purchased
- 7. Piñata Event • Who doesn’t love hitting piñatas?! • Celebrate with the streamer as they level • Viewers vote to stuff piñatas with additional items • Claptrap voicebox guides streamer to its location
- 8. Badass Event • Who wants to become a badass?! • Selected viewer’s Twitch handle becomes the name of the badass • Then it’s streamer vs chat • Chat votes on actions to help either the streamer or the badass
- 9. Streamer Feedback • Good success working with streamers early on • One common thread was allowing them to customize settings • Can toggle events on and off and even add delays
- 10. Localization • Be inclusive, just like the game • ECHOcast supports 12 languages Chinese Simplified Chinese Traditional English French German Italian Korean Japanese Portuguese Brazil Russian Spanish Thai • Less than half of all viewers are using English (41.23%)
- 11. Mobile and Tablets 📱
- 12. Enhanced Experience API • First game to use this new Twitch API • Game client programmatically sets this for streamers • Viewers can filter streams by Vault Hunter Playthrough Mayhem Mode Potentially more down the road!
- 13. Los Angeles Reveal Event • Debuted ECHOcast version 1.0 • 200 live streaming stations • Great way to test systems before game launch • Over 350K viewers, many earning loot for a game not even out yet!
- 15. Launch Reception • Overwhelmingly positive Streamers praised quality of life improvements and viewer engagement Viewers enjoyed profile data, earning loot, and interacting with streamers! • 39% of streamers had extension activated Number jumps to 49% for streamers with more than 3 viewers • Streamers using extension averaged 62% more minutes watched to those that didn’t
- 16. #teamwork • BIG thanks to the ECHOcast team! • Gearbox Frisco, Gearbox Quebec City, Rick in AL and Richard in AUS Multiple timezones, but we did it! • Thanks to Twitch, especially Travis, Humberto, Drew and Adam!
- 17. Thank You!
Editor's Notes
- Hi, my name is Scott Velasquez, I’m the Online and Social Product Owner for Gearbox Software. As a 20 year veteran within the gaming industry, I’ve had the privilege to work on a wide variety of amazing projects. But none more exciting than what I’m up here to talk about today.
- The Borderlands 3 story being developed and the announcement of the Twitch extensions API were a perfect match. Gearbox formed our Online Social department and we immediately decided that any extension we created needed to support and address the needs of both the streamer and their community. To kick things off we held an internal hackathon and discussed content creator’s KPI’s, hacked together some prototypes and walked away with a lot of great, on-brand ideas.
- We divided out the extension into two categories: passive and interactive. Passive addressed informational inquiries that viewers would have like, “What level are you?” “What kind of gun is that?” “What did you choose for your skill tree?” Interactive was focused on interactions between the streamer and their community while also rewarding viewers with loot for their own Borderlands adventure!
- By making general gameplay information readily accessible to viewers, not only were new viewers up to speed on where the content creator was at in their game, but the content creator themselves no longer would need to feel bad by not having to repeatedly answer the same questions multiple times. As you can see, the amount of information that viewers can dive into is pretty extensive and pulls from real time data of what is currently being shown in game. The second a player changes their loadout, loots an item, or spends a skill point, and etc. it is reflected in the overlay available to viewers.
- Next were the interactive events, and here is where we got to be creative and have some fun. Our first interactive event is the Rare Chest Event. This event allows viewers to join for a chance to select one item from the streamer’s chest in-game. After selecting an item, ECHOcast mails it to their in-game mail system where it can be retrieved and used almost instantly. If for some reason the winner doesn’t own the game yet, but has a SHiFT account, we store the item so that it’s available the moment they purchase the game and start playing!
- Our second interactive event is the Pinata event! Each time the streamer levels up their character or achieves a new Guardian Rank a pinata event begins. Viewers can then vote on what they would like to see stuffed in the pinata as the pinata starts to spawn in the streamer’s gam. It’s up to the streamer to then melee the pinata to break it and true to Borderlands style, one of the options has a chance to spawn a live grenade!
- And last but not least is the most interactive event of all, the badass event! Occasionally as the game decides to spawn a badass organically, the game will also initiate a badass event and give one lucky viewer the glory of having their Twitch handle override the badasses name in the streamer’s game. It’s on now, streamer vs chat with chat given the control to either help the streamer or the badass viewer. This fight can go on for multiple voting rounds as the voting options cycle every 10 seconds and chat continues to vote until the streamer is taken down or the streamer succeeds in taking down chat!
- Gearbox wouldn’t be anything if it wasn’t for our community. So it was important to our team to not only create a unique extension experience, but to hone and fine tune our creation. And we could think of no better focus group than streamers themselves. So throughout the development process and even through launch, we’ve been in constant communication with our Twitch content creators. Listening to their feedback and using it to make this something that they want to KEEP using. And for those select few who only like part of what we made, well we catered to them as well by offering them an easy toggle menu where they can pick and choose what functionality to keep
- Borderlands as an IP is all about inclusivity. So it made sense that once we were ready to launch our extension, we made sure that it was localized in a ton of languages. One thing to call out that might interest future developers, less than half of all viewers using the extension prefer English.
- Mobile was the #1 feature request after our reveal event in May which only supported desktop. We support both mobile and tablets now with slightly different layouts depending on the screen size and orientation. Again, we’re trying to be all inclusive, we don’t want you to miss out just because you’re on the go or don’t have a computer! Twitch made an amazing mobile app, we definitely wanted to support that.
- Another big quality of life improvement we implemented for both streamers and viewers is the Enhanced Experience API from Twitch. We’re the first game to use this and what’s great about is that is we do some of the grunt work for streamers by programmataically setting appropriate tags. And from the viewers perspective, this makes finding the streams you want to watch, much easier.
- Now that we were ready to launch our creation, we decided to give it the ultimate stress test. In May of this year we held our official gameplay reveal event, where we filled 200 gaming stations with some of the best content creators Twitch had to offer. The result, over 350K viewers, the majority of which were not only using our extension, but already earning in-game items months before our September 13th launch date.
- Ok, you’re seeing it here first, this a new ECHOcast trailer that hasn’t been released yet.
- The sentiment regarding our ECHOcast extension has been overwhelmingly positive. Streamers not only love what we created, but saw an immediate increase in engagement, retention, and above all else, they had a lot fun. And that’s what video games and our community are supposed to be all about.
- It’s time to wrap this up, but I just want to say that ECHOcast would not exist without our amazing team. Gearbox Frisco, Gearbox Quebec City, Rick in Alabama and Richard in Australia. Quite the production accomplishment as well with multiple timezones involved, but we did it! And last but certainly not least, thanks to Twitch who has been a great partner throughout this entire process!
- Thank you and for anybody interested in learning more we have roundtable panel on Saturday. Enjoy TwitchCon!