You can click on the little edit box with the controller in it right below the broadcast title box in your dashboard: The first and most important thing is to make sure your game is set to SpyParty on. Since the Notifier only supports right now, this will assume you’ve got a account and have successfully streamed something.
Anyway, since tytalus did such a great job with his tutorial, I’m not going to talk about how to set up streaming, and I’m just going to talk about how to set up your stream so it gets picked up by the SpyParty Streams Notifier and lands your stream on this page. Speed is really important because streaming is performance-intensive, and it turns out frame rate in SpyParty really matters for hitting green Action Tests.
Some folks in the beta are experimenting with OBS, which is also open-source and seems promising it appears to be slightly faster than both ffsplit and xsplit (which is commercial software with a subscription model).
He recommends using ffsplit which is free and open-source. That will get you set up and streaming quickly. If you’ve joined the Early-Access Beta, tytalus wrote an awesome tutorial for streaming to, and he posted it in the private beta tester Discussions forum, so check that out first, it’s stickied at the top.
Post your feature requests in the comments! How To Stream SpyParty and Get On This Page Plus, I can eventually customize this with SpyParty-specific features, like highlighting games where both sides are streaming simultaneously, which are a lot of fun and extra-educational, making a link to one of the cool sites that will show the two streams side-by-side, or transparently extending the Notifier to cover some of the other streaming services like. Luckily, supports a pretty rich API, 2 so I was able to fix both of these problems, and provide a centralized place for SpyParty fans to sign up for stream notifications.
Sometimes it’s even better than spectation and replays because often the streamers describe what they’re thinking as they play! Beta testers have noticed a distinct increase in the base skill level of newbies who have joined after watching streams…in fact, you can basically play Sniper while watching a stream, which is a great way to practice. It needs more work, but I think it’ll help people learn how to play.As I’ve written about elsewhere, I just discovered game streaming relatively recently, and I’ve been blown away by how awesome it is, and it’s especially great for indie games! I love watching people stream SpyParty! It’s not only entertaining and fun to chat with others watching the stream, but until I get spectation and replays implemented in the game itself, it’s also the only way to get a real feel for other styles of play, which is incredibly important at the high levels of play. It’s really long and in-depth and it still only scratches the surface of the game, and it actually prompted me to add a Beginner Mode to the game to limit the complexity that had to be taught (and learned), 2 but we playtested it a bit at PAX and it successfully taught people how to play the game, and I’ve improved it a lot since then, so I’m pretty happy with it so far. There are a number of small challenges in there to (hopefully) keep it interesting.
It walks you through the basic movement mechanics of Sniper and Spy, and then teaches each of the four beginner missions ( Bug Ambassador, Contact Double Agent, Swap Statue, and Seduce Target), first from the Spy side and then from the Sniper side, and then has you put it all together into a full Spy game and Sniper game. The tutorial uses a mix of text and voice narration, 1 and it tries to get as close as possible to how we train people in-person at PAX, which has worked well for years.
After years in Early-Access Beta, with nothing but a four-page manual to help you learn how to play, SpyParty finally has a fully interactive tutorial!