Software Engineering. The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s computer science capstone class. I’ve heard whispers of it since my freshman year, whispers of excitement, frustration- pretty much every emotion you can think of.
Let me break it down for you: the semester starts with some lecture-based classes about project management. However, within a couple weeks, the group projects are started and worked on for the remainder of the semester. Groups are arranged by the professor, but project ideas are generated by anyone who has one. Going into the class, I knew I needed to come up with something- something big.
I believe it was this last summer that I was making myself some scrambled eggs. I wanted some background noise, but I didn’t want to listen to my typical egg-whisking mix of jazz. Instead, I put on a GDC talk about Twitch integration in games.
Twitch integration provided a new level of audience participation. In Cult of the Lamb, audience members participated by voting on the fate of the streamer. Additionally, they could have the chance to join the streamer’s cult.
Flash forward to this semester. My professor was speaking on the importance of our presentations, how we should dress, that he was inviting others outside of the class to attend the presentations- and that got me thinking. What if I made a presentation that invited the audience to play along? This idea would later birth the concept of the Twitch Dungeon Game.
The game would be divided into two sections, the streamer and their audience. The streamer would play a 2D top-down dungeon crawler, with twin-stick combat. Think Enter the Gungeon, or The Binding of Isaac. They would go from room to room, clearing enemies, collecting items, etc. etc. At this point, I paused my presentation.
“You might be thinking, ‘wow, cool, I’ve seen this before.’”
To which I pressed the spacebar on my computer, slashing through that phrase. Introducing: the audience. Viewers of the stream would be able to design the rooms the streamer would go through in a Super Mario Maker-like interface with their own devices. The best part is, it would be straight from Twitch extensions- the viewers would not need to download anything additional from going to the Twitch website.
After the audience creates the rooms, the streamer would play through them. I was very proud of the idea, and it seemed that many members of the class were intrigued. I’m excited to see where this project goes; definitely stay tuned.
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