Usually when I’m struggling with trying to write a piece or can’t even pick up on what’s wrong with it anymore, I step away. In fact, this is always my go-to advice. So, how did this land me in a position where I would be playing the same vertical slice on Twitch for over an hour every Thursday? Over and over. Every. Thursday. (at 4pm EST in case you were curious ;) ) 

It sounds like some kind of torture device to make me hate my own work, right? And yet, what I didn’t expect from the weekly live playing of this anti-perfectionist sandbox-simulator Mini Maker was the way it would impact me as a developer and artist.

The stream was initially suggested by me, I figured we needed ways to capture gameplay from our game for gifs, videos, and posts, and what better way to do it but to also stream and maybe have some fun/get a fan or two out of it? The stream would be myself, Syd (I write the game) and Eliott (our artist) who would be onscreen. The reason for this is I never shut up like to talk to people and perform, and Eliott has a mastery with the game and makes every creation look AWESOME. This deadly combo would mean we’d have lots to talk about and beautiful visuals! Hell yeah! 

What we didn’t entirely anticipate was that working with just a vertical slice meant there were not only the limits that we built into our game (limited pieces, limited time) but also limited missions and gameplay material. Much to our surprise though, it’s been...kind of fun?? to think of different ways to work within these parameters! Here’s how we reinvented our game:

1. Fan Art on Shrooms

First, we came in with the idea of making fan art--after all, the game doesn’t allow for very pretty things (due to said limitations listed above), so fan art always ends up looking horrendous and hilarious. This is great, and already an element of our game that we knew existed but had never considered  being an entirely separate mechanic of our game.  Just a simple “Hey, maybe we need a free create mode of sorts?” and the answer was, yeah! We should! Let’s see if we can budget that in?

2. Fan Art: Hard Mode

Then, once we were growing tired of this stint, I threw in some more mini-games between myself and my coworker--what if you have to START building a thing and ask me along the way what character I’m thinking of. You know,  like the game 20 Questions but way uglier and you have to be making the thing I'm thinking of before you know what it is. Devious. Plus, this made some genuinely terrible creations. Sorry Spyro. You were a good boy. 

All this two person Mini Maker madness really showed us that “hey, what if we let two people play...at once!? That would be cool!”. Co-op mode is definitely a must for our game, and already in the works--this was just the proof we needed.

3. Paint me like one of your French girls!

This one is exactly what it sounds like. It very quickly revealed some things about me that I will likely never recover from. I saw my own soul staring back at me. Would not recommend it. Very dangerous mini-game.

4. Audience-Request

With our now HUGE fanbase of 7 followers on Twitch, we decided to integrate requests from what our audience wanted! We also based things off of our (sufficiently larger than 7) followers from Twitter. This also allowed us to make things for other devs, like this crab for the game devs Agro Crab (who made Going Under). This is our love letter to them. However, this way of playing also made us think “huh, what if we had...Twitch integration!?”. To which the team said “okay, guys, we literally have to make this game in our lifetime, please stop suggesting things”.

Ultimately, playing the game so many dang times actually benefited us beyond the whole “make some footage and gifs” aspect. It allowed us to find new kinds of joy in our game and to see it from a streamer and Twitch audience perspective. If you want your game to be a success with streamers, I'd honestly suggest putting yourself into a streamers shoes.

If you're interested in playing our game on your stream (or just playing it), grab it free while the itch.io Summer Sale still lasts. Throw us a message and play it live--we'd love to stop by and see you play! Check our Twitch out here!