If you've found yourself here, you're likely looking for the best ways to add interactivity to live streams of your game. At Muxy, we've created dozens of interactive twitch extensions for a wide swath of games. This gives us great awareness of the multitudes of engagement experiences streamers can have with their audiences. We hope you find this "cheat sheet" useful in expediting your brainstorming process to please both streamers of your game and your game's community.
Here's a quick guide for how we're defining audience interactivity in this blog post. Help Actions: Provide positive benefits to the streamer. This can come in many forms, but often will be free items or buffs.
Hinder Actions: Get in the streamers way or make the game more difficult (troll). They can be traps, debuffs, buffs to enemies, or even removal of player items.
Combo Actions: These actions are any combination of help, hinder, or neutral actions. For example, changing a stage can help or hinder a player based on their play preferences.
Neutral Actions: Actions that are neither explicitly helpful or a hindrance (cosmetic). Examples could include changing the color of enemies or environments, or adding Viewer names to enemies.
Gameplay Actions: These are actions that directly impact gameplay that are done by one viewer.
Audience Actions: These are actions driven by the overall audience that impact gameplay.
Polls: The entire audience votes to guide an in-game interaction such a dialogue choices, loadouts, and more.
Informational: This gives viewers live game information such as stats, current level, or map.
Note: All recommended genres are listed in order of favorability to the Action Type. But that doesn't mean it can't be applied to other game genres.
Interactivity Table of Contents
Help Actions
Gameplay Help Actions
Spawn Allies
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Sim, Shooter, Action Adventure
Example: Spawning an extra AI soldier on the broadcaster's side in XCOM.
Spawn Powerups
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Allowing the audience to spawn a Berserk powerup in DOOM 2.
Heal Broadcaster
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Strategy, Sim, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Fully healing the player.
Buff Broadcaster or Allies
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Strategy, Sim, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Cause broadcaster's attacks to deal more damage.
Note: This can also include emptying the player's weapon or mana pool.
Increase Broadcaster Resources
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Sim, Shooter, Action Adventure
Example: Give the broadcaster more gold in Warcraft 3.
Debuff Enemies
Recommended Genre: Action Adventure, Action Platformer, Strategy, Shooter
Example: Cause enemies to receive more damage.
Damage Enemies
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Action Adventure, Action Platformer, Shooter
Example: Fully or partially damage enemies .
Hinder Actions
Gameplay Hinder Actions
Spawn Enemies
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Action Adventure, Sim, Strategy, Action Platformer
Example: Spawning a labeled miniboss with a viewer's name.
Damage Broadcaster or Allies
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Sim, Shooter, Action Adventure
Example: Reducing the broadcasters health to 1.
Debuff Broadcaster or Allies
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Strategy, Sim, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Slow the broadcaster's movement.
Decrease Broadcaster Resources
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Shooter, Action Adventure
Example: Take away the broadcaster's lumber in Warcraft 3
Buff Enemies
Recommended Genre: Action Adventure, Action Platformer, Strategy, Shooter
Example: Cause enemies to receive less damage
Heal Enemies
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Action Adventure, Action Platformer, Strategy
Example: Fully or partially heal enemies
Modify Controls
Recommended Genre: PP, any game with repetitive areas that need to be completed
Example: Invert player controls when completing a round of Tetris.
Reset the Game
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: This is truly a brilliant way to allow viewers to troll the broadcaster at the highest level
Combo
Help/Hinder Gameplay Actions
Spawn Items
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Allow the viewers to spawn in a mushroom in Mario.
Note: It should be noted that while the example is positive, the item spawn can just as easily be a bomb about to explode.
Environmental Effects
Recommended Genre: Any, but Strategy and Sim are excellent
Example: Start a fire on the ground in Expeditions: Rome.
Influence Enemy Behavior
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Sim, Shooter, Action Adventure, Action Platformer
Example: Cause the AI enemies to focus on a weakened broadcaster unit in XCOM.
Audience Weighted Interactions
Recommended Genre: Action Adventure, Action Platformer, Battle Royale
Example: Use up or down votes from the audience to determine the severity of an audience interaction. Think about this as the audience selecting a help or hinder interaction like decreasing damage then voting together to determine the percentage of damage temporarily lost.
Change Stage Behavior
Recommended Genre: Puzzle Platformer, Fighter
Example: Add a new rule to a stage's behavior like altering gravity, randomly removing/creating blocks, or increasing the amount of hits required to break a barrier/block.
Note: This applies well to puzzle, racing, or any type of games with incrementally more difficult stage behaviors
Reset the Stage
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Harmful if the player is near the end of the stage but helpful if the broadcaster is stuck or made a bad choice that harms their gameplay.
Change the Speed of the Game
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Changing the speed of the game could help a broadcaster react to situations/enemies easier while it could also hinder because it can troll a broadcaster having a brilliantly quick run through a stage.
Help/Hinder Audience
Indirect Competition
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Action Adventure, Action Platformer
Example: Allow the audience to interfere with the streamer by claiming resources before they can.
Note: This is another fairly broad category that could encompass a lot of different interactions. Notably, the idea here is that there isn't direct competition like in Matchmaking.
Enemy Control
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Shooter, Fighter, Action Adventure, Action Platformer
Example: Allow the audience to control the path or actions AI enemies directly.
Viewers as BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy)
Recommended Genre: Any genre with RPG elements
Example: Allow the users to control the villain in the story, either directly or indirectly.
Viewers as GM (Game Master)
Recommended Genre: Any genre with randomized elements that could be controlled
Example: Allow the users to control the randomized elements of the game, or the narrative direction directly.
Help/Hinder Poll
Enforced Audience Preference
Recommended Genre: Any genre story-driven game
Example: Allow the audience to choose what weapons, abilities, or items the Broadcaster must use.
Character Progression Choice
Recommended Genre: Any, but games with RPG elements are best
Example: Allow the viewers to make character progression choices for the broadcaster.
Level, Character, or Settings Choice
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Viewers choose what level, character, or setting the broadcaster needs to use.
Story Choice
Recommended Genre: Any genre story-driven game
Example: Allowing the audience to decide which path the broadcaster takes in a story game.
Note: Votes are slow. Use sparingly for big decisions.
Jury Determines if the Stage/Game is Reset or Not
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: A viewer can launch a poll that the broadcaster may or may not be aware of that determines the fate of the current run of the game for the broadcaster.
Viewers Determine the Actions for the AI Enemies
Recommended Genre: Any, but best for turn based games
Example: Viewers choose what type of attacks, buffs, aggressiveness etc. that the AI character is using
Buff/Debuff Tug of War
Recommended Genre: Shooter, Strategy, Sim, Action Adventure, Fighter, Action Platformer, Puzzle Platformer
Example: A vote where the higher the votes go in one direction the player gets a buff, but the other is a debuff.
Neutral
Neutral Audience Interaction
Interaction-Only Content
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Locking a mechanic or area behind audience participation. An example is viewers need to summon their energy to unlock a door in the game through the Extension.
Note: This is one of the most powerful types of interaction is creating something ONLY the audience can do.
Matchmaking
Recommended Genre: Fighter, Shooter, Strategy, Battle Royale
Example: Allowing users to pay for the chance to play against the broadcaster.
Naming
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Allow the audience to get their names into the game.
Subscriber/Follower/Donator Perks
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Allow only a subset of your audience to participate in interactivity, driving membership.
Neutral Informational
Spawning NPC characters that linger or quickly move off screen
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Spawning birds, ducks, slimes, leaves, ect. that appear on the screen of the game. They could have the spawning viewer's name or just be a silly nusciance.
Neutral Informational
Overlay Tooltips
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Provide additional information about in game elements.
Mini, Combat, Campaign, All the Maps
Recommended Genre: Strategy, Action Platformer, Action Adventure, Shooter, Sim
Example: Provide additional information and a potential interactivity interface.
Leaderboard
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Give users an idea of who has interacted the most, or any other metric desired.
Wiki
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Provide information about the game that is not readily available while watching someone else play.
External Links
Recommended Genre: Any
Example: Allow a place to purchase the game, or engage with the developer on social media.
This is just a quick sheet to help you think up ideas to add stream interactivity to your game. If you think there's anything missing or have feedback, let us know in the comments!