2013/01/19, 04:26 by checker

Update: Here’s the video of the finals match between james1221 and bl00dw0lf with the full commentary!

I am ludicrously excited about this! If you follow this blog and SpyParty on Twitter or Facebook, you probably know I’ve been really interested in live streaming recently. In fact, just the other day I set up the SpyParty Streams Notifier and I’m writing up a longer post about that and streaming in general, and I was recently interviewed by Chris Priestman on Indie Statik about the growth of streaming for indie games, along with Erik Svedäng who’s working on the awesome Clairvoyance, which makes great use of online replays.

You may also know we’re at the final game of beta-tester insight’s SpyParty New Year’s Cup, which has been a really fun and exciting set of matches, most of which have been live streamed or at least recorded and posted after the match. Watching the live streams and chatting with the other viewers during the games is incredible.

So, what better to do than combine the tournament and the focus on live streaming and go all-in?

We are going to live commentate the finals match of the tournament between james1221 and bl00dw0lf, re-streaming both sides of the match to a single stream we can fade between the two views dynamically based on context, and we’ll have expert level commentary by virifaux and ky, with occasional color by me. ky is going to play director while he casts, picking the best view from the two streams, just like the dude in the video truck at the Super Bowl! We tested all the technical and social aspects of this today, it worked incredibly well, and you can see the results here, with a test game between james1221 and slappydavis:

Tune In

So, at 10pm EST / 7pm PST / 3am GMT, on Saturday, January 19th point your browser to the SpyParty twitch.tv channel:

http://twitch.tv/spyparty

If today’s practice session is any indication, it’s going to be totally awesome!

Assuming this goes as well as I hope, we’re going to start doing this kind of casting more often, with a rotating mix of commentators, so leave comments here on this post with feedback on what you saw and let us know if you liked it, or if there’s anything we can change to make it even better!