I started streaming on Twitch recently after years of considering it and was surprised to find out that I really enjoy it. It looks like I made a post about it a few months ago announcing that I had one but didn’t really get into it until this last month. It started when I decided to stream the mid 90s puzzle game Gubble, partially as a bit but I genuinely wanted to revisit a game I had played when it was released. I had a blast and other people seemed to enjoy finding out about the game too.

I think it’s been good for me to do since it makes me commit to actually playing a game for two hours instead of fighting with my awful attention span and playing the game for 20 minutes, checking my phone, playing the game for another 10 minutes, looking at various websites, and then stopping to do something else. Plus I actually stick with games more instead of starting games and never finishing them.

Since it seemed to help a lot with completing games, I decided to do a game dev stream last night and got a ton done. Again, it helped having people to talk to while I work on my game for a few hours. This was just an art stream where I was making clay art for a short point-and-click adventure. I felt motivated to work on it again after someone at a recent game dev meetup told me that I shouldn’t make an adventure game with clay since it “has been done a million times before” (1. rude and 2. what the hell are you talking about?). I would never do any coding streams because it’s my day job and I don’t wanted to be judged for any bad code, but I’m ok with people seeing me learn how to do clay art and stop motion animation. So I’ll keep doing more of these since it seems to make me more productive and it’s fun.

I highly doubt it will never get too elaborate or have a dedicated schedule. I have no interest in this being a side gig or a thing that makes money but it’s been nice as a thing to keep me focused and make solitary activities a little more social.