Gearheads: First Stream Report

So, I spent more or less a full day of tinkering with streaming software, gradually finding answers to questions like “How do I make the game fill the screen?” and “Why isn’t there any sound?” The software I used, OBS, is capable of recording video instead of (or in addition to) streaming it, so you can fiddle with settings until it’s right. Nonetheless, there seem to be some streaming-specific problems that you don’t get from a local recording. I set twitch to keep a recording of the stream, and the recording has problems with laggy pauses. It seems to me that they correspond to points where there’s a lot of sound. I’m trying fix that by following advice online, but the only way to know if it works is to do another stream. So there’s my motivation to do more streams right there.

I didn’t make any progress in the game. I got as far as that Disasteroid vs Cockroach level a few times while trying to set up the streaming software, but no further. During the stream itself, I decided to start Tournament Mode from level 1, so I didn’t get anywhere near there. Doing this reminded me of something I had forgotten: Every level you win gets you an extra life. So there’s a potential strategy of starting from level 1, where it’s easier, just to accumulate enough lives to get through the later levels. But you’d have to be a lot better at the game than me to apply this strategy. I’ve only made it as far as level 25 once, so any strategy that starts with “play all the way through level 25” is a no-go for the time being.

I didn’t really give advance notice of the first stream, because I didn’t want much of an audience for my first try, but I’ll probably be doing them daily at 6:00 PM Pacific time (9:00 Eastern, 2:00 AM UTC) for a little while, whether anyone watches or not.

5 Comments so far

  1. matt w on 18 Dec 2018

    6:00 PM Pacific is 9:00 PM Eastern I think? At least I hope you weren’t up three hours later than me last night.

  2. Carl Muckenhoupt on 19 Dec 2018

    Yes, of course. Corrected.

  3. DANoWAR on 19 Dec 2018

    I can’t seem to find a link to the twitch.tv page for you on here. Is there any?

  4. Carl Muckenhoupt on 19 Dec 2018

    Gah, forgot the link! It’s https://www.twitch.tv/muckenhoupt.

  5. DANoWAR on 22 Dec 2018

    Okay, found your channel…

    Well…you could work a bit on the video part of the stream :-D

    I see the video image change every few seconds. You should maybe change a few settings to improve this…

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