Lately, I’ve become interested in trail camera footage. Cameras are placed in the wild to observe wildlife behaving as they naturally would. Sometimes something interesting happens, and sometimes it doesn’t! All just depends on when you check and what the subjects are up to.
I’ve thought: what about an Inform Trail Camera? Would it be interesting to witness Inform programming in the wild? I could open a Twitch stream whenever I open my Inform IDE and just let it run. I might be doing something smart, something not-so smart, or nothing at all!
Viewers are anonymous; the only way I can know who is watching is if they send a chat message.
Here are the projects I am working on right now:
I, Thief, a large Zorkian adventure
An as-yet unannounced game
An extension for adding tutorials to a game
An extension for a Bisquixe hyperlink command bar
I may or may not be looking at chat while I work. I’ve considered adding a channel to my mostly inactive Discord server for discussing Inform Trail Camera, and perhaps I will.
Whether you just want to peak in, follow closely, or just fill the room with natural language ambience, Inform Trail Camera will be there!
I have another channel for streaming video games, so any notifications from this channel are exclusively about Inform Trail Camera. I program at least a little most M-F during the day (CST). This won’t be at the same time every day, but you can get notifications whenever a stream starts if you like.
It’s been over three weeks since I launched Inform Trail Camera!
I estimate that 90% of the current base of ID/MO, a survival horror roguelike, has been written on stream. This must be the first large Inform project made in this way.
I like this idea. I’ve uploaded a couple of videos of me working on a game although, if I am honest, I don’t think anyone watched them, maybe live/Twitch is a better venue.
The trail camera is a bit like found footage. Someone can wander in, see what’s happening for a while, then leave. Or someone might leave it on in the background like one of those holiday yule log videos.
However, I have considered scheduling some more structured streams where I mic up and discuss what I’m up to. My guess is that it’s tough to round up viewers, but the payoff is dialogue with the audience in the moment, as opposed to working through YouTube comments after the fact.
I’d be interested in more scheduled streams also. Though, I don’t have a Twitch account, and the few times I’ve checked the link, it seems like I’ve just missed a stream that happened a few hours ago. Bad luck on my part, I guess.
That makes sense! I have a mostly dormant discord server where I announce streams, coordinate playtesting, and note game dev progress.
It’s not really used for discussion, but anyone interested in an alternate means of notification can check the #inform-trail-cam channel here. I’ll say whether I’m using a mic or not.
Thanks for the link. Admittedly I don’t use Discord much either, but having a second notification channel is nice, and temporarily retained recordings are also convenient for people like me who miss the initial streams. I poked around the footage a bit, and the RPG-like mechanics look cool.
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