Make your creature react to chat emojis

Reactions belong to the creation

Chat reactions are part of the egg, just like its animations. Its creator chooses them, and the streamer who gets a copy receives them as they are: if a 😂 makes the creature happy, that is because its author wanted it so.

Two safeguards apply. A reaction can only point to an emotion the creature has drawn, otherwise the chat would trigger an empty animation. And the “mort” (death) emotion is never triggered.

Fourteen emotions can be triggered. The workshop lists them by their French names: heureux, excite, content, ennuye, triste, colere, fatigue, malade, affame, sale, amoureux, fier, effraye and endormi.

On the public side, a creation's page in the directory lists its keys under “What wakes it up”, without saying which emotion each one triggers: which one plays on what is yours to discover live.

Set up reactions in the workshop

1. Open the egg in the Creation workshop, while it is still a draft.
2. Draw the emotions you want first: only emotions with frames appear in the list.
3. In the “Chat reactions” section, click “Add a reaction”.
4. Type the emoji or word in the “Emoji or word” field, then choose the “Emotion played”.
5. Click “Save the reactions”.

An egg carries 64 reactions at most, 1 to 24 characters each. The same key cannot point to two emotions: a duplicate is flagged when saving.

Emojis, words and Twitch emotes

• An emoji is looked for as it is in the message.
• A word is compared without capitals, accents, punctuation or spaces, and digits that imitate letters are brought back to them: 1 for i, 3 for e, 0 for o, 4 for a, 5 for s, 7 for t. “GG”, “g g” and “gg !” trigger the same reaction.
• A Twitch emote is typed out in full, the way its name is written in chat: “Kappa”, “PogChamp”.
• A word is looked for anywhere in the message, including inside another word: a reaction set on “gg” also fires on “eggs”. A short word is therefore worth choosing with care.
• Emojis come before words: if a message contains both an emoji key and a word key, the emoji plays.

The longest key wins

A creator can set 🔥 on one emotion and 🔥🔥🔥 on another. But a message containing 🔥🔥🔥 also contains 🔥: without a rule, the order in which the reactions were written would decide, which is to say chance.

LiveGotchi therefore compares keys from longest to shortest, and the first one found plays. 🔥🔥🔥 beats 🔥, “ggwp” beats “gg”. For words, it is the length once cleaned up that counts. The most precise key, the one that asked the chat for the most intent, is never hidden by a shorter one.

Why it does not flicker

A hundred messages with the same emoji should not replay the same emotion a hundred times. Two rules, set in the code, dampen the chat:

• The same emotion does not play again within twenty seconds. This rule protects against spam of a single emoji.
• Six moods at most per rolling minute, all emotions combined. This rule protects against a burst of varied emojis.

Both are needed: the first alone would let six different emotions through in one second, the second alone would let a single emoji take up the whole minute. A mood triggered by chat lasts eight seconds.

What the chat does not leave behind

The text of a message is only used to find a key. It is neither stored in the creature's state nor written to a log: an emotion is drawn from it, then it is forgotten.

A list of excluded words, kept by the platform, also stops an abusive message from triggering anything. It too compares cleaned-up words: dots between letters or digits in place of letters do not get around it.

For the creature as a whole, from the egg to the overlay, see Virtual pet for Twitch and OBS.

Frequently asked questions