So it came to pass, as foretold by the ancient monks of Tokataal and repeated badgering on Twitter, that on a fateful Thursday evening, the first ever gaming stream that was attempted by myself was broadcast on the the service Twitch to literally people. At most, 4 people which was 4 more than expected to tell the truth. What happened though was something completely foreseen but not entirely for the reasons I thought it would be.

In fact, one could argue that it was the best experience you can have in how not to do a live stream. In some ways, I couldn’t even bring myself to watch it more than 5 minutes afterwards. You are your own worst critic of course, but seriously…. this sh*t just got real.

Ok everyone, places, now is the time to stop vomiting and……action!

In order to narrow down the various faults of course, we have to be more specific rather than just reach for the vodka and drink to take the pain away. In essence, this will be more cringe-worthy than listening to your parents talk about the various times they had sex, but realistically, it is the only way to learn from mistakes.

The first major point was lack of testing, which lead to one of the major problems with the stream as a whole. I had tried to ensure that everything was working a couple of days before, however I didn’t listen to the audio feedback from the stream at the time. So what went out was a little bit of video game audio, but my voice….what a way to make people’s ears bleed!

The microphone in use was the same old microphone that was used on the podcast some years ago and unfortunately that was a problem, as the microphone has a nasty habit of picking up every little thing including the heater going on and off in the background. The microphone itself was also set to the highest level as I didn’t hear myself really when recording the test locally.

This proved to be a mistake, and during the actual live stream, the audio level was as such that I could burst eardrums. Which when laughing at some of the ridiculous rubbish on screen, was more than enough for the few that did watch to scream in agony and want to go on a killing spreee.

Now even you know what keys to press like the real professionals probably don’t.

There were also times that I had no idea that I had muted the audio and therefore nothing was heard and it was only due to feedback on the chat window being set-up on the laptop nearby that I knew what was going on. This leads onto something else which was entirely unexpected but given the technology that’s involved, now seems obvious.

Lag, as in, whatever was on screen, or whatever I had said, you as a humble viewer of the whole affair, saw it about 20 seconds later.

This meant that when mistakes were made it was about 30 seconds before anything was changed to ensure that everything was set back to normal. Every time as well something was wrong too, it took away from any train of thought or random crap that was coming out, so it made for a very disjointed experience. This will be an issue which will never go away fully and therefore has to be something which be always in the mind in future.

It also didn’t help that a few minutes before broadcast, the software being used, XSplit Broadcaster, decided to go slightly up the wall and things were not working as intended. This pretty much sent me into a panic and with no real time to resolve it, I went live with what was working and that pretty much sent my mentality out the window. But as those wonderful showbiz types say, “the show must go on!” Also they say “I can’t work with with that man, he’s simply drained me!” and storm to their trailer for a nap but never mind.

Ok, techincal issues aside, what about the actual content itself?

This was very much hit and miss but had some laughs along the way.

Snake? Snake? SNAKE!

I tried a theme of firsts for the first stream, and with that, playing two games that I had never played at all, so everyone was seeing what I was seeing for the first time and therefore seeing genuine reactions to what was going on. This lead to some weird moments at first as I didn’t know what I should do for playing each game, not even knowing the controls, and there were times where I literally just lost my sh*t and sounded even more than a crazy man who was without his court-ordered minders. Considering the way the stream had degenerated into a complete farce, I decided to just roll with it.

The play-through of Metal Gear Solid: Ground Coffee for example, was a spectacular failure from a game play point of view but took an unexpected turn for watching how to fail in a tremendously stupid way to be stealthy. With jokes about watching Snake’s butt crack and lamenting badges falling in super slow motion for no bloody reason.

This lead to an amazing series of events where I didn’t know what I was doing, but somehow still being alive to run around an army base and kill probably the entire population of Grimsby before finally getting murdered by a big ass armored car! A car crash in every sense of the word, and I’ve got to be honest, I really enjoyed it, and it was grand I got to share that ridiculous situation with others first hand.

Some feedback I got afterwards confirmed the technical issues but in a way I got a real taste for doing this sort of thing and certainly, I do want to try it a few more times.

In order to combat some of the issues which were on show, I’ve taken to purchasing a second monitor to effectively allow some better control over the software and actually see what is currently getting shoved out to the internet. This will also be a better way to see the chat window and be able to respond in a slightly better manner than what was being attempted, though of course that is still going to be subject to the issues written about earlier. In essence, if I can see what I’m doing, I’ve got half a chance. Possibly.

Now we can watch porn twice as much!

If you are interested on seeing how bad it was, audio problems, lack of concentration and the sense I’ve taken more drugs than the entire player population of the English Football Premier League, then you can see the past broadcast here;

http://www.twitch.tv/lordofleisure/profile/past_broadcasts

At some point I will attempt to at least correct some of the audio so it doesn’t burst your eardrums again but that will be a little while. For those who did show up on Thursday, I can only thank you for not killing me afterwards.