Good Normals Gaming

A personal project I have been working on lately is called Good Normals. Good Normals is the name of the Twitch stream that I run with my husband Josh. He is a fighting game tournament player that hosts a practice session with his friends every week, and always wanted a way to record and stream matches, and I wanted to be able to stream some of my favorite games as well. Over the past few months, we have worked together to learn the ins and outs of game streaming and commentary while putting together the necessary equipment, software, and branding to make it happen. Streaming on Twitch is extremely popular right now meaning that it is hard to stand out from the crowd flooded with low quality content, so let me share what we have done and are still doing to produce content that may actually be worth watching.

First, let me talk about the name Good Normals and our logo and branding.

The name Good Normals comes from fighting game terms, it refers to the basic but effective “normal” attacks rather than more complicated “special” attacks. The logo includes silhouettes of Street Fighter characters using their best “normal” attacks from those games. We think this name could make us stand out, and also it’s easy for people to recognize us as a place to go for fighting game content. After we came up with the name, I set up our Twitch and Twitter accounts, put together a basic website, and earlier this week, our first batch of T-shirts using my design arrived.

Once we had our idea in place, we had to actually get ahold of some equipment in order to begin streaming. Luckily, there are a lot of resources online to help choose what to buy at different budget levels. In addition to a dedicated laptop, the most important piece of equipment is called a capture card - the one we use is made by a company called El Gato. This acts as an HDMI passthrough that grabs video and audio from the gaming system and records it on the computer. Most people who stream games, however, want to also record live video and commentary of themselves while they play , so we had to figure that out. This was a big headache for a while, but finally we decided to go with a Snowball mic and a high definition webcam. Only in the past few days have our streams actually had acceptable audio and video quality, after many streams that lacked in one way or the other. It takes a lot of tweaking and trial and error to get everything working well together.

On the software side of things, there are quite a few options that range from free to extremely expensive. For the time being, we are using a free tool called Streamlabs OBS to act as a virtual livestreaming studio. It handles all of the audio and video inputs and allows for a lot of customization, such as UI overlays and multiple scenes that are easy to switch between. All of this gets sent to Twitch and YouTube through Restream.io, which is another free software that coordinates between the two services and allows for us to chat with the audience on both platforms at the same time.

As you can probably tell by now, it takes a lot of work and several tools to produce a quality gaming stream, and even if you do everything you’re supposed to do, it doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed an audience. We’re trying hard to make the Good Normals stream something worth watching. I will occasionally stream my favorite single player and story-driven games in the “let’s play” format, and Josh streams fighting games every Wednesday night. This weekend, however, is big for Good Normals. It will be the first time we stream at a major gaming event. We’ll be streaming and hosting commentary for a game called Windjammers at a huge tournament called Combo Breaker which draws thousands of players from around the world to the Chicago area each year. It’s possible that our stream this weekend will have our first really significant viewership. Streaming gaming events may be the future of Good Normals if everything goes well. Hopefully all the hard work Josh and I have put into this project will pay off, and everyone will be able to enjoy watching.