Artholomew Video's Stream Challenge
Winner
IndieCade 2022 - Performance Award
PLAY22 Hamburg - Most Creative Game
Nominee
A MAZE 2022 - Human Human Machine Award
A suite of interactive performances to be performed live on a Twitch stream. Each performance reads live input from Twitch chat, so the audience will directly impact the performance.
Artholomew Video consists of both Alistair's own performances on his Twitch channel, as well as the software itself which is freely distributed online so that anyone can perform these those themselves.
He is in the process of developing it into a live show, which debuted at A MAZE 2022 in Berlin.
The goal of the project is to allow anyone to take part in creative play, to leave perfectionism at the door and enjoy mess, chaos and the unpredictable.
For streamers, each challenge encourages them to embrace the unpredictability of audience input, to connect with their community by creating something together, and to live in the moment.
For viewers, the streams allow them to contribute to something creative without needing to worry about making a mess, being put on the spot, or getting it wrong. All they have to do is type into chat.
Past Performances
Videos are muted by default. Un-mute them in the player above to listen.
Tech Stack
Unity C#
Artholomew Video is developed in Unity 2020 and coded in C#. It is distributed as a Windows and MacOS application.
Twitch API
The game runs a .NET version of the Twitch API to get input from viewers live on Twitch.
JavaScript PHP
Viewers who are not signed in to Twitch can join in by scanning a QR code. This takes them to an HTML page that updates based on what the streamer is playing. Here they can type in suggestions that are handled by PHP code in my server, and cached. Regular HTTP calls from the game to my server check for new inputs.
Multithreading
During the Reading challenge, viewers can modify book text continuously. Applying these changes to a whole novel can take a long time, so these are run on a background thread.
Webcam Video Shaders
The game makes frequent use of the performer's webcams. Throughout the game the performer is invited to speak to fictional artist Artholomew Video, who appears as a green-screen overlay on top of their camera feed. Shaders are used to manage the transparency of the green screen.
Audio Handling Music Handling
In the Singing challenge the game processes the byte data from microphone inputs, and caches them to be drawn upon by the viewers. In the Musical challenge, the performer cue up sections of their backing tracks (e.g. verse, chorus, breakdown) and the code will seamlessly switch between them while matching the beat.
Wikipedia API
During the Reading challenge, viewers can request topics for the performer to speak about, while they edit the text. The game asynchronously performs a search for these keywords by making HTTP calls wto the Wikipedia API. Relevant text is parsed from the returned data and used as