Hero Dev Update — SOS Closed Alpha 2
Hey everyone,
We hope you’re as excited as we are for the final weekend of SOS Closed Alpha 2. Here’s a quick breakdown of everything we’ve got in store for you on the Hero side of things.
The Cast
We’ve always felt something was missing from the vanilla SOS watching experience. Over the course of these alpha tests, we’ve scrambled, scouring directories, frantically searching for all of the amazing performers that we saw while watching broadcasters like Katierouu, Sattelizer, or GiantWaffle.
Often, we’ve found ourselves with multiple streams up at once, desperate to catch the action from every angle.
We’ve also seen some of you start your streaming journey with us, and we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to give you your chance in the spotlight.
That’s why we’ve built a new feature: the Cast
The Cast let’s you see all the players in the match who are Twitch connected and streaming.
Now, you can find moments like this with crReaM:
https://clips.twitch.tv/FancyExcitedJuiceBigBrother
And TheChief1114:
https://clips.twitch.tv/ZealousCredulousAlligatorCeilingCat
In every match.
Why stop there (we all collectively asked ourselves)? Why not make sure that we never get any real work done ever again at Outpost?
To ensure we spend all our time watching Hero, we’ve also built a live video preview and live feedback display on all streaming contestants, so that the most interesting performances are easily identified.
Join us in uncovering the most entertaining performances out there.
Rocking the Vote
For those not in the know — whenever a player signals for a supply drop with a flare gun, their viewers can vote on Hero to determine their fate. Of course, we assume you’ll probably vote for the papaya crate each time if you could, but we like to think that sometimes a cloud of mosquitos can solve any problem.
Based off your feedback we’ve made a few polish tweaks to voting. Now on both desktop and mobile sites, the winning vote is highlighted for everyone to see.
You might have also seen that the Contestant that triggers the vote gets a neat little callout…
Well, we wanted to make sure that if you trigger a vote, everyone knows where they can watch that mosquito bomb go off. So now, if a Contestant is Twitch connected, viewers can click through to their stream. Pretty neat.
Spectator Feedback Animations
You’ve seen these guys right?
Well, we think they’re pretty sweet. But we’ve been wanting to see them really come to life.
That’s why now, when clicking or holding down on your mouse you’ll be seeing brand spanking new animations that’ll really help you feel like you’re sending love to Sequisha when he ends an alliance:
https://clips.twitch.tv/FrozenTenderChimpanzeeRlyTho
Shocking Sentiment Updates
Giving a voice to the crowd through our Feedback system often begs the question, just how many emotes should we have and what should they be? Should we have five different fruits? Can fruits represent emotion? In a future blog post we’ll go over our thought-process in greater detail but for now we’ve narrowed it down to five sentiments: shock, laughter, applause, love, and anger.
If something seems like it’s missing — we’ve swapped out the previous terror emote for a ‘shock’ emote that comes with some very surprised animations.
Dude, Where’s my Channel?
While we’re working on building you an amazing Hero user profile, we’ve started with a simple quality-of-life improvement that will make it easy to share your stream around.
You can now find your Hero stream page under the “My Stream” option in your drop down.
Say Hi
You can experience all these changes to Hero and SOS by joining us this weekend (November 4th — 5th) from 9am — 9pm PT. We promise to be loyal teammates, as long as you meet us on the beach of course.
Your feedback will help shape Hero! We’d love to hear what you think.
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook for news and join in on the discussions on Reddit and Discord.
