Conclusions about the Hackathon & Livestreaming

This hackathon was a blast for me! I ended up doing 5 livestreams with a total duration of about 12 hours. You can find links to them including short summaries in the previous blog post.

Here are my main impressions and learnings:

I ended up doing less livestreams than I hoped, but with higher quality than I expected

Each of them ended up much longer than I thought I could handle

There was a lot of work that I needed to do off-stream, including all my work after the Day 3 stream - that's why it became silent

Inversely, this means that the livestreams contain exactly the most interesting-to-watch work that I did during the hackathon

I was really proud and happy about my setup, now with a DSLR as webcam, better microphone...

...and most importantly the iPad screensharing for graphical notes!

I love doing livestreams, I wish I could do them everyday, I want to do them much more

I love explaining stuff

I love interacting with you guys, even if it is just through chat

Having a constant monologue helps me structure my thoughts during easy to medium difficulty tasks

There are some difficulties and barriers in livestreaming that I still need to overcome

A) Difficult and boring parts

I'm really afraid to hit boring parts of coding on stream.

This might be either really tricky parts (like debugging, figuring out an algorithm from scratch) where I need to concentrate to the point of becoming silent...

...or just mundane code maintenence tasks (refactoring)

...or waiting for the code to compile, every built took almost 2min

Rather than avoiding streaming completely, like I did now when such things turned out to last longer than, say, 15min, I would love to find a way to make even the "boring" parts entertaining

I think I already did a much better job of keeping my monologue and interaction going during difficult and boring parts compared to the past, but I can improve further

B) Keeping everyone on the same page

In the beginning of every stream, I had to basically redo a 5-10min explanation just to give the current work context and then another 5-10min to introduce/review the current microtasks that I'm working on

People who joined later during the stream missed that and were left quite confused (I think)

People who don't have time to watch the livestream at all are left with very little info (only my short summaries)

There are concrete steps I can take to ease problems A) and B)

A) Embrace boring parts and show game development as it is

The most important mental change for me will be to accept that I will have to show you boring parts of the development if I really want to stream a lot in general

It is important for me to realize that by verbally expressing even more of my thought process or maybe just my feelings as I go through difficult or boring parts, they can become interesting as well

And: Livestreams are a slow format, a lot of people watch it very passively or even in the background and don't mind even long quieter stretches

Getting a regularity of streams going with the overarching goal of documenting all aspects of development is a much higher goal than optimising the interestingness of any individual stream

B) Find a simple out-of-stream place to keep track of the current work progress

This could be as simple as a Google Doc that is continually kept up-to-date where I jot down both the general high level topic that we're working on as well as the concrete, small tasks that we are working on right now

This adresses both people who have missed earlier livestreams as well as people who join in the middle of an ongoing livestream

It can also contain an "archive" part to serve as a more detailed summary of what happened for people who can't or don't want to watch the streams

Creating short video highlights from the most interesting parts of livestreams (development success moments, funny-looking bugs, interesting Q&A sessions) can be a way to make the sometimes very interesting content that livestreams spontaneously produce more accessible to a wider audience. I'll see if there is a fast way to cut these together, I think I can even just do it online with the YouTube video manager

There can be three different flavours of livestreams that are interesting

1) "Let's Build Citybound" - Development Livestreams

This is the classical development livestream (like I did during this hackathon) where I cover mostly my ongoing everyday development which I extensively explain and comment on, interspersed with Q&A sessions about the game vision

This will be the most common/frequent of streams

2) "Let's Talk Cities" - Research & Discussion Livestreams

This is my idea for evolving the "Patron's calling" livestreams

My main takeaway from those was that I can happily just talk for hours with my most engaged fans (who might not necessarily be Patrons) about all kinds of city topics and I understood that that results in something really interesting, podcast-like to watch

I realized that this would be an opportunity to showcase another important part of Citybound development: non-programming research - learning how real cities actually work

Having a selection of concrete topics for each stream to learn about would give a little more structure and inspiration

Mixing live voice and chat discussion with me screensharing Google-searches and reading relevant articles (as I would on my own, but loudly) seems to strike a particularly nice balance between a linear show and open-ended interaction

3) "Let's Play" - Playing existing city-building and related games



This was an idea that I expressed already during the hackathon, but then didn't end up having time for (I prioritised making progress on boring parts of the code)

The idea is that on "off-days" I would just relax and stream me playing some existing games that can serve as positive and negative inspiration, trying to both be just a normal player, but also analysing gameplay and design choices together

The most important conclusion that I can take with all this in mind is:

Citybound is a huge project that takes unpredictably long but is interesting throughout its development for a diverse audience. I should realize that this allows me to continously produce video content that 1) I love to create 2) showcases the development 3) draws in more people 4) increases my actual focus on steady progress.

Finally, I am only not completely sure yet how to make this happen logistially. How would that interact with my release process (that I already threw off course anyways) and how do I make sure that I find the time, energy and peace to do livestreams as regularly as possible? These are questions that I will ponder over the next days and that I will try to make life adjustments for. I'll keep you in the loop and I hope you're looking forward to a more video-driven time as much as I do.

Love you all,

Anselm