Chat is a player

Yesterday I wrote about the idea behind FortWar: a stream game where chat is a first-class citizen. Today I want to show what that actually looks like, because "chat can play" can mean a lot of things, and most of them are a poll.

Friends who are watching, not playing

The people I had in mind are my friends who'll have a stream on like TV. They're cooking, or at work, or on their phone on the couch. They're not going to install a strategy game and learn the controls. But they'll type in chat.

So in FortWar, typing in chat is the controller. No download, no account, no game client. If you can type !join, you're in.

Viewers type !join and their avatars walk out to work, each one tagged with their name.

What every command does

Each of these is a real thing in the fort, not a cosmetic:

• !join: your avatar spawns in the streamer's fort with your name over its head, and fights.
• !support <building>: your avatar walks over to a building and boosts it. A mine gets +1 drone, a turret fires 50% faster, a barracks gets +1 trooper and faster training, a factory repairs twice as fast, a medbay heals 50% more, a beacon sees 4 further, and the core makes an extra 0.5 crystal a second. !mine and !turret work as shortcuts.
• !defend: you head out to hunt monsters near the core.
• !leave: you head home.
• !charge and !strike: chat's orbital strike. Enough of chat charges it, and then the first person to type !strike calls a beam down on the biggest crowd of monsters on screen. (It gets its own post next week.)
• !boss <name>: name the next boss. One suggestion is picked at random, and it shows up over the Behemoth's health bar with your name as the credit.

When chat is playing the fort, a big "Play from chat" card sits at the top of the chat panel with the main commands, so a new viewer knows what to type without anyone explaining it.

Why it has to be real help

I could have made chat a cheering section: confetti when someone types. But people can tell when what they do doesn't matter, and they stop typing.

So every command does something you can measure. A fort with a lively chat behind it mines faster, shoots faster and has more bodies on the walls than the same fort without one. When the horde gets through, it can be the viewers' avatars standing in the gap.

There are a few limits so a huge channel can't swamp a fort: up to 40 avatars per fort, one command per viewer every 1.5 seconds, and avatars head home after 10 minutes without a message. Inside those, chat really is a player.

Chat can be the villain too, if you want

There's also a chaos switch in the chat panel. With it on, viewers can vote the next wave's twist (!fast, !armored, !swarm, !acid) or join the horde themselves with !horde. That's for the chats that would rather watch the fort burn, and it gets its own post later in November. The streamer can turn it off any time.

Try it

If you stream, bring your chat to fortwar.io and pick Twitch chat as the fort's chat source. If you'd rather be the chat, come hang out while I build the game live at twitch.tv/kiralumen and type !join. And if you have an idea for a command, say it in chat or drop it in the Discord.

— Jeff