Inspiration
It's a lot more fun to be active while watching a stream. Challenging and being challenged is the core reason why we play. We thought that layering challenges on top of streams leveraging live data from inside the game would create a more engaged viewing experience.
What it does
The Azarus overlay asks viewers one pop-up question after every match based on one or multiple statistics chosen randomly from our challenge library. The streamer sets a reward pool that gets split evenly across the right responses: "For 20 AZA, what type of weapon did I make most kills with?".
At the same time, viewers can at the beginning of a match set an "objective" to the streamer over a performance on a given metric, tied with a reward: "If you do more than 3 penetration kills, I'll send you 1 AZA".
With accrued AZAs, the players can then go the azarus.io store and redeem their credits for digital goods.
This simple mechanics create a lot of interaction on stream and make it more fun for the streamer to stream and for the viewer to watch.
How we built it
The extension is built on Angular, the backend in Node.JS dockerized and running on AWS/ECS, data is stored on a Mongodb. We use a ton of AWS tools (Route53, ELB, VPCs, Fargate, S3, Cloudfront...). Both back and front connect to the EOSIO blockchain which is used to operate and settle the challenges as well as providing clearing house mechanisms.
Challenges we ran into
On the first test launches, the servers totally blew up!! they scaled to 100 containers and still weren't taking all the load - we had to fix the bottleneck live to keep the situation in check.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of our first streamer who tested Azaru, Griefdrums, ended up being eligible to Twitch's partner status! Also - we don't need 100 containers anymore for much larger loads :)
What we learned
Extensions are a formidable way to interact with the community. Onboarding is a breeze and it's great to have access to a little bit of the stream's real estate.
What's next for Azarus
Supporting more games, more streamers and bringing more impact on-stream and off-stream!
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