Streaming
How to be a social introvert
Making friends and playing games
In the June of 2017 I purchased Friday the 13th: The Game on Steam. It had come out a couple weeks before, and I had noticed some hype around the game on the Twitch streaming platform. I was enjoying the game a fair bit and played it frequently. One day though, I found myself in a match with one of the streamers I watched. It was a pretty crazy game and a lot of fun. The next day I randomly got matched with the same streamer again and he remembered me from the previous day. He ended up inviting me to join him on a regular basis.
Oh how the turn tables
I ended up becoming friends with a lot of the regulars he played with and found that most all of them streamed
themselves. I had always though it'd be silly for me to start as a nearly 40-year old at the time, but thought
what the heck, and made my own channel.
At first I would stream whenever, playing games like Cities Skylines on a Sunday morning. That riveting game game play didn't bring in too many viewers. However, as I shifted to a regular schedule of Monday to Thursday, I found myself attracting some of the other channel's viewers who wanted to watch these games in a more grounded and chill environment. After a month, I was beginning to dislike Friday the 13th and heard of a similar game called Dead by Daylight. I switched to that game for the majority of my stream time, mostly playing as a survivor.
Getting by with a little golf with my friends
Wednesdays would be my day off from DBD which we called Friendsday Wednesday. On those days I would play games
with my viewers. Starting with Golf With Your Friends, we'd also play Jackbox and a few other group games. The
Friendsday Wednesday tradition has outlasted my streaming career as it's still something I do with some
remaining friends from the community as well as others.
My good friend Darcy allowed me to use the Amoebunnies as a theme for my channel. People would be selected to teams on my Discord server and eventually I'd write a Twitch bot (Amoebot) to interact with players in chat, pledge to their team and have a more interesting experience. I also wrote a rules randomizer for Golf With Your Friends night so we'd always have a fresh way to play. That is unless people wanted to play the Hellscape ruleset.
Rare clip of me running not hiding
Towards the end of the year, DBD three nights a week was getting tiresome, so I changed Mondays into Storytime
Monday. Each week I'd play a new game with a story which we would all enjoy together. We played games like
Candleman, Last Day of June, and SOMA, as well as many others to get a break from DBD monotony. While this was
definitely a hit with regular viewers, it added an extra stress of making sure I always had something new to play.
I slowly wore myself out and decided to wrap up my channel nine months after starting.
Since then, I have managed to keep in touch with several people from the community via my discord server. Although I have made a return to streaming now and then, it has never been serious and mostly been for specific events such as capturing kill videos during World of Warcraft progression.
