Dev Update: Twitch Integration Tangents. And Some New Stuff.
What’s up, Internet? As always, the dev team has been too busy doing our jobs to keep you updated about doing our jobs. Fear not, this dev update is here to let you know what we’ve been up to since the last update.
First of all, things have gotten a bit crazier lately. There’s a lot more people using GameWisp than there were eight weeks ago. This growth has lead to some interesting design, development, and technical challenges that weren’t anticipated so soon after deploying our Twitch integration.
Oh, that’s right, we also deployed our Twitch integration, which was not so subtly hinted at in our last blog post. The purpose of this post is to discuss our Twitch features as well as show off some new stuff users have been asking for lately.
Free Benefits for Your Twitch Subscribers
Free stuff for Twitch subs, you say? Yep. We do that now.
Simply put, our Twitch integration lets you use our benefit fulfillment tools to give stuff to your Twitch subscribers for free. This is a great way to give your subscribers more and use our tools to manage benefit creation and delivery effortlessly and (in many cases) automatically. Give your fans more while doing less. That sounds like a win to me.
Charlie Sheen memes…too late or never too late?
I’m not going to go into how all the fancy Twitch stuff works. Suffice to say, it’s fancy, and here are some moving pictures all you kids are crazy about to prove it.
Images. Images Everwhere.
We get feedback constantly from users about ways to improve the Channel page. One of the most frequently requested features is supporting images on the Channel page. We put this off for awhile, because we were afraid images would clutter things up. Despite our best efforts to ignore them, the requests kept coming, though, so we finally put on our big kid pants and did it.
I’ll take three pieces of flair, please. Courtesy of BlameTheController.
You can now attach an image to each level on your channel page. This can be any image, even (the Seven help us) animated GIFs. They will be displayed at 100px x 100px, so images with a square aspect ratio will look the best.
These images will also propagate to user’s profile pages. Here’s what it looks like:
Twitch subscriber, AND a GameWisp Insider? That Silver Rank looks mighty nice on you, lyreharper.
The image fun doesn’t stop there, you can also attach an image to a benefit to make the benefit more descriptive. Like so:
Catblobs, making the world a better place since 2015.
Better benefit and level management
We decided to rethink the Benefit Manager and Level Builder to make those processes more straightforward. The fruits of our furious thought are a new benefit page and level page on the channel dashboard. Here’s what they look like:
Benefit Management, now contained to its own tab in the Channel Dashboard.
A new Level Builder. I hear benefit ‘zdsfg’ is particularly compelling.
The new Benefit Manager and Level Builder make it even easier to offer benefits to your fans. I anticipate recording a new video describing how these features work very soon. Keep an eye out for it on Twitter. Or don’t. It’s your life, man.
Let Them Make Levels!
Finally, if you look closely in the previous image, you’ll see “Level 4” on display in the Level Builder. That’s right, after much internal strife and wringing of hands, the dev team has made it possible for you to have up to six levels on GameWisp. Insanity, I know, but if you want more than three levels, who are we to stop you?
The four levels displayed on the GameWisp Channel page. That’s right, six levels are so many that we couldn’t even think of FAKE benefits to put in Levels 5 and 6.
GameWisp takes $1, $2, and $3 for each Insider that subscribes at Levels 1, 2, and 3 respectively. This model is upheld for Levels 4, 5, and 6; we take $4, $5, and $6 respectively. Our reasoning for that is that we really want these levels to be worth it for the creator to make and manage. By taking a larger cut, we anticipate that channel owners will ask a higher price, making the upper levels premium and really special for fans.
Pushing Directly to YouTube
And finally, to prove we haven’t forgotten about all of our channels routinely using GameWisp to interact with YouTube, we implemented a “Push Immediately To YouTube” feature. You can find it in the Series Manager.
“Push Immediately.” Such enormous power for a tiny checkbox.
If the “Push Immediately” checkbox is checked, the video uploaded for that episode will push to YouTube immediately after it is finished uploading. The push typically starts within five minutes of an upload completeing.
As always, the video will push with its thumbnail, title, tags, and description, and be placed in the proper YouTube playlist. Be aware, in order for these things to push over with the video, they have to be provided before the upload is completed. Otherwise they will not be pushed. The video will be pushed to YouTube as a private video and will be published on YouTube at the YouTube Publish Date you specify on GameWisp. YouTube Publish Dates can be altered on GameWisp up to the minute that the publish is set to occur.
What’s Next?
These updates really helped to round out the GameWisp platform. The next six to eight weeks will primarily focus on stability, bug fixes, and improvement of our core features. Don’t despair, though, I’m sure we’ll sneak in a new requested feature or two.
All of the updates in this blog post came as the direct result of input from users and content creators. In short, when creators ask, we deliver. So if you’re a YouTuber or Twitch Streamer and think there are ways to make GameWisp even better, let us know. We ran out of our own good ideas years ago ;).
Originally published at blog.gamewisp.com on Jun 23, 2015
