Poly Bridge Lets Twitch Viewers Pitch In With Creations

Bridge-building puzzler Poly Bridge [official site] has managed to cross the chasm of early access and is now in full release territory. There's a bunch of new bits and bobs as part of the 1.0 build but the one which caught my eye was the collaborative play options for Twitch streamers and viewers.

The idea is that streamers can accept viewer suggestions for a bridge design - either an altered version of what they were already working on or an entirely new design of your own concoction. It feels like a pretty cool back and forth as well as a good fit for the kind of game Poly Bridge actually is.

Here's the info:

If you're a viewer you connect to Twitch via this Poly Bridge website, find an active integrated stream and load that up.

"When the streamer indicates they’re accepting suggestions, you can download their bridge design and alter it, or start from scratch, by using the in­-browser version of the game, and submit your own bridge to the streamer as a suggestion."

If you're the streamer you activate the integration by authenticating your Twitch account in-game:

"To enable the Twitch integration in-game go to Settings/Other and click the Twitch button. You will need to authenticate with Twitch the first time you enable the integration, once authenticated press the ‘Start Session’ button and wait for the confirmation."

When you're playing you can open viewer suggestions when you want. When you get suggestions you'll see them in a list. You can also do things like limit the ability to suggest designs to subscribers. I can see that being a useful tool for either protecting yourself from trolling or incentivising subscriptions/rewarding subscribers.

As the streamer you can click suggestions from the list to load a preview and figure out what to do with them - either load them fully, keep the suggestion for later, ditch the whole design or discard the suggestion and mute the person so you don't have to look at any future suggestions from them.

There are a bunch more controls and bits of info on the service via the "learn more" option on the developer's website. Although the game is now out of early access Dry Cactus note that this particular feature is in beta so they're open to suggestions and feedback as people experiment with it.

I gave up streaming a long time ago because I wasn't enjoying it but I do still watch other people's streams from time to time. I'll be curious to see how this develops.