Broadcasting Your Game To The World
May 8, 2020Marketing is crucial to your board game’s success. Game developer Brandon Rollins says that marketing should start on day one and be present every step of the way. Marketing can be a grind and a slow process. At Card Bard, we will hit peaks and valleys that will consistently excite us and bum us out. One area of marketing is presenting your work in progress game to your followers through live streaming. A great-looking live stream takes a little bit of work but is easily achievable. If you haven’t checked out our article on how to compose your shot and the basics of lighting, I recommend you to read that first!
DON’T SIT AT YOUR COMPUTER YET!
Before you sit down at a computer, I recommend doing a quick sketch of what you want your board game’s live stream to look like. Always have a webcam presence; this helps to put a face with a product for the audience. For Card Bard, we decided to have both creators present, and due to social distancing, we both were remote.
Building your Board Game’s Live Stream
Think about a live stream as layers. Our first layer is all the inputs, so our webcam feeds, and our board game’s feed. I recommend using Skype to host the other gamer as it utilizes the NDI plugin in OBS. Your second layer will be an overlay to clean up the feeds.
Lastly, on top of all of that, add your lower thirds or rotating information.
We sat this up as hotkeys to quickly hid and turn on layers.
MANDATORY
If you can only do one thing to enhance your live stream, add a stream starting soon intro graphic (Don’t be the streamer who looks clueless before going live) and a thank you for watching graphic to end on. This cleans up the stream and takes it out of the amateur level.
Live streaming is just as new to us as it may be to all of you. So please follow us on twitter @keyankenney @aarongriffin23 and ask us any questions you may have!
