Month: August 2021

When you think of streaming games, your mind turns immediately to video games, but streaming services like Twitch have a healthy Tabletop RPG community that will let you stream Dungeons & Dragons as well as other classic tabletop titles. This quick guide covers how you can organize a tabletop stream, which software you might want to use, and some great examples from the genre for you to watch on Twitch.

Organizing a tabletop stream

Unlike traditional game streaming where you’re streaming your own gameplay in a single or multiplayer game, tabletop streaming involves a certain amount of pre-planning to organize multiple guests and participants. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to stream a video game version of D&D to Twitch, check out D&D Online, an MMO based on the original tabletop game.

However, for that traditional tabletop experience, you’ll need other people either gathered physically together or, perhaps more practically, in a video chat. If you want to organize a game and need more people, why not advertise your event on social media, or check out conversations on Reddit and Discord?

Which software should you use to stream Dungeons & Dragons?

Assuming your game is organized as an online video call, you need a way to arrange those different calls and stream them too. One of the easiest solutions is to use XSplit Broadcaster and Skype along with NewTek’s Network Device Interface (NDI). This allows you to bring each person in the Skype call into XSplit Broadcaster as an individual source which you can then easily place and resize. This saves having to capture parts of a call window as you would with something like Zoom.

With XSplit Broadcaster, you can easily organize and customize your layout and theme to give it an epic D&D makeover. You can even add your own overlays for further customization, helping to bring your game to life and capture your audience’s attention. If you browse through some channels on Twitch, for instance, you’ll see it’s common for the Dungeon Master to appear in a larger window than the players as an easy visual reference for someone joining the stream.

Put yourself in the action as you stream Dungeons and Dragons

Another tool that can improve the look of your tabletop stream is XSplit VCam. It allows you to remove and replace your background, or simply blur it so the focus is on the person – and it’s all possible without a green screen. This can provide an extra layer of fun to D&D gameplay, by changing backgrounds to suit the action of the game as you go along streaming Dungeons and Dragons.

For example, if players were to find themselves wandering through the Forgotten Realms or trapped in Castle Darkhold, their background could change to represent that location. Check out royalty-free image sites such as Pixabay for inspiration.

How to visually represent the game

People watching the stream will be focused on the players and their choices. However, they’ll also want to keep up with where the players are, so you want to visualize it somehow as you stream dungeons and dragons.

Perhaps the simplest way to represent a tabletop game is to film it. You can set up an additional camera as a source over the board and move the pieces yourselves. However, this approach can be slow and not very clear on a stream. One alternative is to create custom maps to help your audience visualize your gameplay. If you’re not an artist, there are many map tools listed on D&D Compendium to explore.

Some tabletop streams to watch

Before creating your own stream, you may find it helpful to watch some others to get a good idea of how game masters have perfected their multi-cam tabletop streams to stream dungeons and dragons. Helpfully, Twitch has its own dedicated Dungeons & Dragons area, and, with over 450,000 followers, there are usually lots of games to view. One of the more popular D&D streams is High Rollers DND, showcasing a smart and engaging layout for D&D games. There’s also Rivals of Waterdeep, a D&D actual play stream brought to you by the official D&D Twitch channel.

Beyond D&D, there are a few other areas of Twitch you might like to explore to get more ideas and inspiration. These include Tabletop RPGs and Board Games.

For a more in-depth look at how XSplit Broadcaster can help your stream, check out this interview with tabletop gaming aficionado and member of Rivals of Waterdeep, Tanya De Pass.

Automation makes life easier, so why not make your streaming life easier as well with macros! Live stream automation with macros means you can do all sorts of things! From your camera zooming in when you scream playing a horror game to triggering a timed scene change. So let’s discuss how macros and automation can make your streams easier and more powerful!

What are Macros?

Macros are an extension built into XSplit Broadcaster, if you don’t have macros installed, you can go into the plugins store (which can be found by going to the Tools menu and selecting Plugin Store), search for macros, and install it easily. The first time running macros you will need to give permissions so be sure to click OK. This is the first step to full live streaming automation!

Macros are basically scripts or a series of commands that are run when a basic condition is met. So the condition is when something happens, it can be on pressing a key when the audio is at a certain level, when a video stops playing at a specific time, there are really tons of possible event types and you can write your own custom scripts.

So when you set an event type, you can then select an action to happen. This could be switching to a scene, starting a stream, opening a projector, or event running another macro. You can have multiple actions happen after an event. You can even have multiple macros running simultaneously, which really means if you timed everything right you could add automation to almost all of your stream!

You can test your macros and they will only be active when the event listener is enabled. Now the possibilities are endless with macros, but I’d like to talk through some cool examples of how you can use them. For all the samples I show here, I’ll leave a link below each section to download the macros so you can import them into your own presentation and try them out.

Automate Live Stream Commercial Breaks

So if you’re producing a live show, timing is everything, and live stream automation can help! You don’t want to miss a cue and cut back to talent too early or too late, so why not set a macro to automate your ad break? As Forbes said, streaming is presenting more opportunities for brands so getting this right could be important! If your ad break is running a series of videos in a playlist, it’s simple to automate this.

First set up your ad break scene. If you have a series of video and image ads, I recommend using your video editing software to stitch these together into a single file. Then in macros set up a macro for on key down. Then just set the key. Then set the action to switch to a scene, and select the scene with the ad break video. Enable the event listener and then set up another macro. This time the event is when a media source stops. Select your ad break video file then set the action to switch the scene to whichever scene you go to after an ad break.

You can add more macros to make this more complex like cutting to the ads intro video after a break or implementing custom stinger transitions.

Download this macro here

Starting a stream on time

If you need to start a stream at an exact time, regardless if you’re ready or not for a client, then this is a useful macro!

For the event, set the scheduled time and select the time your stream needs to start. Then set the switch to the scene and select a scene with a standby graphic that’s safe to start the stream with. Then set an action to start the stream. Make sure the event listener is on and you’re ready to go!

Download this macro here.

Always stream and record

So one of the mistakes I always make when doing an event is not starting the recording when I start the stream. Depending on the format of your show, this can be an absolutely devastating error if you promised your client a high-quality archive or if your internet goes out and you want to keep capturing a live event for later upload.

So, you use macros to set a hotkey that will activate your stream and recording. This is especially useful if you’re planning to stream to many different platforms or record multiple scenes.

Download this macro here.

IRL Live Streaming Automation

A lot of IRL streamers actually relay the stream from their IRL backpack to a cloud PC running broadcasting software. This is to keep their stream live when they go into an area where their cell reception is cut off. This can also be managed by macros.

Set an event for when a stream source is online, this is the RTMP feed source you’ve added to your IRL backpack. Set the action to switch to the scene with the RTMP feed. Then set up a macro for when an RTMP source goes offline. Have it switch to a standby screen for whenever your stream feed re-connects.

This solution can also be used as a backup system for always keeping a stream online if you’re doing a project for a client, you would just need to set up an RTMP server to output an RTMP to this relay system.

Download these macros here.

There are really endless ways you can use macros for live stream automation, this is only a small sample of use cases. The possibilities are endless so play around with the extension and see what you come up with! What’s the most inventive use you’ve found for our macro system? Or if you’ve never used it before, what do you think this might be helpful for? Let us know in the comments below!

Back in the day streaming sites were their own niche, sites like justin.tv, livestream.com and ustream all specializing in different types of streaming content. Now every social media site has to have some form of live streaming functionality, but which site is the best place to stream your content? Also, quick disclaimer, we’re not going to say what is the best streaming site, because there isn’t one. It all depends on where your audience is, for you or for your client if you’re doing some corporate streaming work. This is also going to be focused on sites for western audiences, as viewers in Southeast Asia, or China have other sites where the viewership is centralized like Douyu TV or Bigo Live.

Where should you stream gaming content?

For gaming, Twitch still theoretically sits on top, as it was at the forefront of the gaming revolution when it comes to streaming. However, it still lags behind its competition in terms of discoverability. For brands, in terms of digital marketing, Twitch does have its own advertising sales team, but you need to contact them directly to get started.

If discoverability and digital marketing opportunities are important, traditional social media marketing sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have the advantage. The best options, in this case, are YouTube and Facebook, both of which have cultivated a large gaming audience and allow broadcasters to promote live streams to their existing fanbase created on their pages.

YouTube allows display ads to be run to promote live streams, Facebook does not allow direct boosting of live streams, but you can boost a post promoting the live stream and cross-post your live stream on pages that have given you permission.

Finally, there’s reporting to consider, and in this case, lord Google wins with absurdly detailed analytics reporting on all your content. Trust me, when it comes to growth knowing who your audience is and how they found you can be key!

IRL/LifeCasting

Now if you’re lifecasting or streaming IRL content, it will really depend on where your audience is. The aforementioned sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch all support just chatting content including things like talk shows and travel/vlogging which they have categories for. However, if your fans are on Instagram or Tiktok, things are a bit more limited.

In the video below we discussed how you can get set up to stream on Instagram, though it’s not quite as straightforward as you might hope. For now, TikTok only offers live streaming access to some accounts, however, it likely will soon roll out access to more accounts, and all you have to do is pull a stream key from the app and use XSplit’s custom RTMP to broadcast.

Influencer or Affiliate Sales content?

If you’re looking to be your own home shopping network, the traditional live streaming site of choice was Facebook, however, their pivot towards gaming means your content will be hard to find on the site outside your usual fans. One platform you may want to consider, depending on your region, is Amazon live.

Yes, Amazon.com has its own streaming service outside of Twitch and it’s purely focused on e-commerce. All you need to be is an Amazon store or affiliate and you can download their Amazon Live App which will allow you to generate a stream key to go live on their site via a custom RTMP.

The great thing about Amazon is you can set up a carousel of products on your live page that people can purchase from your store or you earn a commission via affiliate sales! You can even create promo codes for your products to share on stream to further influence sales. Now if you’re in other regions, such as Southeast Asia, many of the e-commerce platforms like Shopee have integrated live streaming in a similar manner on their site.

Corporate Live Streaming

Now perhaps the audience is your client, be it a wedding, corporate event, or amateur sporting event. Usually, the client’s major concerns are reliability, ease of use, and security, and in this case, I believe YouTube is the best solution.

In terms of reliability, well you can’t beat YouTube, it works well everywhere and if your client anticipates viewers in areas with spotty internet connections, every stream is transcoded and you can even stream up to 4k while people watch you as low as 140p! For ease of use, well it’s YouTube, everyone should know how to watch a YouTube video and have an account. Finally, in terms of security, you can make your YouTube streams private and invite people via email.

If your YouTube account is a company account you can actually create events and enable them to be visible to only those within the organization, which saves time on adding potentially hundreds of emails. Now, of course, there are options like dacast and wowza which will give you white label solutions, password-protected streams, and embeddable players, but these get expensive. If you’d like to know about these solutions though, do leave a comment below.

Should I stream to everywhere at once?

If you’re still not quite sure where you want to stream, then stream to as many places as you want! XSplit Broadcaster supports multi-streaming, which means you can broadcast to as many platforms as you’d like, but you will need a license. You can find out how to set that up right here! The big advantage to this is you can pull from multiple places you have audiences at once and find where your best platform for live streaming is, catering your content more to one place over time. You may also find that you do well streaming in multiple places as is!

But I want to know from you! What sites do you use? And Where have you had to most success? What are some key features you need from a streaming site? Let me know in the comments and if there’s anything else you would like us to discuss, that’s the place to let us know as well!

Hello fellow TikTokkers! So you’ve decided to expand your social media empire to the realm of TikTok. It’s a great place for putting out day-to-day moments of your life, but what if you want to put out TikToks of your gameplay or short interviews, this isn’t so simple. So right here we’re going to take a look at how to record gameplay for TikTok and how you can quickly produce gaming-focused content!

Setup Your Gameplay for TikTok

We’ll be using XSplit Broadcaster for recording gameplay for TikTok so first let’s do some quick setup.

Tiktok videos are in a 9:16 resolution, so basically set your resolution in XSplit to 1080×1920 and frame rate to 29.97. This is easily done by clicking the dropdown menu in the top left of Broadcaster.

Next, let’s set up the recording settings. Click on the Record drop-down menu and click the cog next to it to open the recording settings. Set standard as the quality setting as with TikTok there is a file size limit on recordings. If you will be editing this gameplay recording for TikTok in a program like Adobe Premiere Pro make sure to enable multi-track audio and force constant frame rate.

Capturing Gameplay for TikTok

If you want to record your PC games for TikTok it’s easy, just add the game source to your scene and position it accordingly. You can do this by clicking Add Source > Game Capture if you’re capturing a PC game natively, or if you’re getting a second PC/Console through a capture card you can click Add Source > Devices > Video > [the name of your capture card]. You can also add your webcam and position it in the same menu!

Now if you want to fill up the video of the gameplay you recorded for TikTok, you can use a color matte to add a background and add text using the text source. This is easily done by clicking Add Source > General Widgets > Colour Matte and Add Source > Text.

Recording Interviews

If you’re planning to collaborate with other creators or do some short interviews, it’s easy to set this up as well. Just add your webcam, then use your video chat app of choice, and screen capture the call window. We’ve detailed how you can easily set this up before on the blog.

You can hold alt to crop the video so you can position it nicely to fit the video area. This is a really useful feature on any source in XSplit Broadcaster, the alt key on your keyboard will enable you to do this! You can even add filters to your face as well by right-clicking on the camera source > Effects > Filters!

Make sure to select your microphone in the audio settings menu (Tools > Settings > Audio) and use the audio mixer to set the levels for you and your guest properly. You can get to the Audio Mixer in the Tools menu as well! If you enabled multitrack audio, you can also adjust these levels in your video editor. This can be very helpful when you’re going to record gameplay for TikTok.

When your file is ready you can just upload it directly to your TikTok account via the web. I would say that you don’t need masterful editing, the important part is getting the content out there and keep improving as you go! As Forbes mentioned, TikTok is constantly seeing massive growth with one in six people in the US actively using the app in September 2020 so it’s a good time to get involved! With that being said, what’s your favorite gaming content on Tiktok? What social media sites do you feel have helped build your audience?

We’re interested in what you have to say in the comments about this one, be sure to let us know if this guide was useful and if you want more content like this about TikTok or anything we should be discussing here for that matter!