What is it?

Unique Twitch integration that allows viewers to suggest changes and improvements to broadcasters’ bridge designs in real time.

For Streamers

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. Note: It can take up to 60 seconds for Twitch to correctly inform Poly Bridge of a current active stream, so please allow enough time between starting the broadcast and attempting to start a session.

With a session active just load up a level and start building, works with Campaign, Workshop and Sandbox! You decide when the audience is allowed to submit suggestions, how frequently, and whether to restrict submissions to your subscribers only.

You will want to direct your audience to twitch.drycactus.com to start the collaborative building process, and a chatbot will also be regularly broadcasting the specific url for your session in the chat to encourage viewer engagement.

Interacting with your Audience

The first tab, Viewer Suggestions, is where you can see a list of suggestions submitted by your audience.

Viewers can only submit suggestions when you explicitly enable the ‘Allow Suggestions’ checkbox, which by default is off. By doing so you can stay in control of when you want your audience to engage and help you build, or when you prefer to go solo and have the audience take the backseat.

Keep in mind that viewer latency on Twitch floats on average between 10-15 seconds, so try to account for that when loading suggestions and interacting with your audience in general.

As you receive suggestions from your viewers they are added to a queue, with the most recent at the top. Click on a suggestion to load a preview and decide what to do with it:

• Load it
• Don’t load but keep the suggestion
• Don’t load and discard the suggestion
• Mute the player and discard the suggestion, any further suggestions are automatically discarded

With the preview open you can also use the Next and Previous buttons to quickly browse your list of suggestions.

Controlling the Integration

Aspects of the integration can be controlled from the Settings tab, such as:

• Chatbot broadcasting and its frequency
• Subscriber-only mode (for Twitch Partners)
• Viewer Suggestion Cooldown Period
• Managing the list of banned players

History

In the History tab you will find a number of auto-saves, which happen when loading a viewer suggestion. This allows you to safely load a viewer’s suggestion and then return to your previous design if you wish to do so, without losing any progress. This is also useful because it allows you to load a viewer suggestion, copy a section of it, return to your previous design and paste the new bridge section, effectively allowing you to mix’n’match from different viewer suggestions and add to your existing design.

Viewers

To give you an idea of how viewers interact with you, here’s a screenshot of the minified in-browser version of Poly Bridge they use to build.

In this view, the stream and chat are embedded into the webpage, when you open suggestions a viewer can then hit the ‘Start Playing’ button which opens the build area in a modal view on top of the stream. Viewers have access to the same tools as you do, except they cannot run any simulations. Once they’re happy with what they’ve built they can click the ‘Submit Suggestion’ button which will send you the savefile.