We just wrapped up Big Bad Game-a-thon 2025. I'm not one to brag but I think it was our smoothest event yet. I say that every year, because we're constantly improving. This one was special though. This year we moved to using the infrastructure I built for restream.space.
To say this was terrifying is an understatement. I tested everything religiously, but you don't really know how things are going to go once you introduce a 54 hour event with 10 staff members and 40 runners all interacting with it in different ways at the same time; you know? But it went marvelously. I have a list of tweaks to make that's as long as my arm, but it filled the core purpose perfectly and everything I had to throw into my bug tracker I'd call "QoL improvements and small bugfixes".
Restream.space, in a nutshell, is a small video content delivery network I'm running off a bunch of linux VPSes that do nothing but shuttle un-transcoded video around to each other, and a control plane that builds a website around broadcast graphics and web players to deliver a full "Marathon" presentation into a single web page. It's a weird combination of a home-run Amazon IVS and NodeCG, but more simple than either of them, and purpose-built for marathons and stream events.
It'd been sitting "ready" for something for months before I finally decided its first event (at least using all the automation and not just parts of it) would be BBG. I spent most of the entire month leading up to the event anxious about this decision.
But it went perfectly.
Read More...Valve and Itch have been in the spotlight for being more or less forced by "Payment processors" to pull certain adult content off their storefronts. The short story of it is Valve pulled a couple of games down while Itch pulled down everything marked mature/adult temporarily and had to sort through their entire library to find certain kinds of content to remove. One of these responses drew more ire than the other, understandably.
I tend to believe this is a factor of how big they are and how much weight they had to swing around to fight back. But that's not really the point of this ramble.
Two of the big things I see repeated over and over in criticism of Itch specifically here:
2025's been a bit of a wild trip so far. Writing, game stuff, and streaming have all taken a somewhat smaller back seat to more outward facing impactful work. I haven't had much to show for it but now I do.
I've been working on a project for about 18 months now to create a solution to allow people to self-host a Discord screenshare like experience. Part of this was trying to provide a solution for people wanting to leave Discord, but leaving Discord brings with it losing their arguably pretty alright voice and screenshare options. You've got Mumble and Ventrilo and those old school options for voice, but streaming? Not much.
I initially started writing OvenEmprex for this purpose. OE sits in front of a video streaming server called OvenMediaEngine and turns it into a Discord-like experience, somewhat. It's a simple web page that watches the streaming server and pops up video players as people start and stop streams, just like Discord does. You still need a streaming software package to push to it, because actually capturing windows/games and pushing streams is really hecking hard, but it's an option.
Well here's the thing... turns out I wrote something much better suited for running events than copying Discord. So I pivoted. OE is still there and is more or less "done" for its purpose, but I moved on to something bigger: Restream Space.
Read More...2024 was pretty wild. I don't do these year in review things often. This is the third I've done despite this blog existing for eight years now. I mostly ramble about games, but I got a few things I'm comfortable putting out on the big ol' internet in addition.
First of all, I ended up a tech administrator for Kusogrande. As a result of that I set up for them a backend video pipeline so we no longer have to capture racer streams off Twitch. It's got some bumps and dings I'm still hammering out but a couple weeks ago I finally got it to the point that I'm comfortable sharing the middleware I wrote to make it all work. It's an undocumented pile of Magic Code at the moment but it represents the ability to take a standalone WebRTC and RTMP server and turn it into a Discord screenshare approximation and stream handler. I think that's important.
Big Bad Game-a-thon 2024 went off without many hitches. I'd call this the first one I actually "ran". Last year I was the chair but I came in in the 11th hour and mostly took on a policy of "Change as little as possible". This year we made a few changes, and I think for the better. Some more well-defined policies for reviews, more careful decision-making. I don't plan to turn the marathon into a formal "thing" but having someone organizing things so everyone else can be their goofy adorable selves is important. I guess I'm doing that now.
I also had four games in that marathon, despite also running it. That might have been a bit more than I could handle; hah.
I started some shit in preservation circles. Romhacking.net closed down and I ask myself how much trouble I caused with my Langrisser Stuff and if that was part of the conflicts high up that eventually caused its collapse. At the end of the day I don't think I have that much power. I also worked with a friend to produce a more complete archival solution for FurAffinity in the wake of its founder dying and leaving its continuance a matter of question. FA looks like it'll survive, but the option for more robust and complete account archival is never a bad thing.
Read More...I almost feel like this needs some kind of "Platforms hate this one trick" clickbait title. But anyway, I politely requested Twitch terminate my affiliate agreement yesterday.
This decision had been a long time coming. Several months ago Peebs did the same thing and found that, possibly obviously but not something I was aware of, de-affiliated streamers have no ads on their streams. I'd been an affiliate since day one of the program and had just assumed ads ran but the streamer had no control over them. Not the case.
So I'd been thinking about this for awhile, and really there's a lot of reasons for this decision: