Virtual pet for Twitch and OBS: a creature that lives on your overlay

A creature, not a looping animation

A classic overlay mascot replays the same frames, stream after stream. An alert fires, then disappears. Neither remembers what happened the night before.

A LiveGotchi creature does. Its stats, its age and its evolutions depend on what the chat did during previous streams. The idea brings the Tamagotchi to mind, with one big difference: here a whole community looks after it, and only while you are live.

That is what makes it a virtual companion for Twitch rather than decoration: the audience comes back to see how it is doing.

From an egg to its evolutions

1. The egg. Every egg is drawn by a creator. You pick it in the Incubator, where its page shows the evolution tree and its conditions, without revealing what the stages look like.
2. Hatching. The egg hatches in the Nursery, then the creature appears on the overlay.
3. Stages. When the conditions of its stage are met, it moves on to the next one. Some stages open onto several branches: the creature takes the first one whose condition is met, so two communities raising the same egg do not necessarily end up with the same creature.
4. The end. During a stream, it can die of old age, or if its health stays at zero for too long.

Off stream, it sleeps: it does not age, and time off stream does not count toward its evolutions. A few days' break costs nothing.

What the chat changes for it

• Chat messages already feed it, with nothing else to link.
• Once linked to Twitch with a six-letter code, it also hears follows, subscriptions, bits, raids and the hype train. No password ever goes through LiveGotchi.
• Its four stats, health, strength, precision and mana, rise with that activity and wear down with airtime.
• Its reactions: an emoji or a word chosen by the egg's creator makes it play an emotion. The details are in Make your creature react to chat emojis.

The audience does not need to read a gauge: when a stat drops, a bubble above the creature says so, and the chat knows what to do.

What surrounds it on screen

The creature is not alone on the overlay. Widgets sit next to it: what it is waiting for to evolve, what it is asking for, its four stats, its identity, and what the stream produced.

Decorations drawn by creators dress up the scene, and some react to chat activity. Several creatures from the Nursery can also live together in the same OBS source.

And it fights: in the arena, creatures battle each other, and none of them ever dies there.

What you need to install it

• OBS, with a browser source. The free LiveGotchi OBS script sets it up at the right size, with its widgets: the exact steps are in Install your creature in OBS with the free script.
• obs-websocket, optional: it lets the creature walk on your sources instead of a bare floor.
• A LiveGotchi account. Sign-up is free; the beta is closed and access opens in waves.

There is no software to install apart from OBS.

Who it is for

For the streamer who wants to give the chat a part to play and something to look forward to: the creature only grows during streams, and what the audience does tonight decides what it becomes.

For the pixel art creator, who draws eggs, their stages, their emotions and their chat reactions, then offers them in the Incubator. That is what the creators page is about.

Frequently asked questions