March 5, 2023

This Week at the Crumb Club - March 5th, 2023

This week at the Crumb Club, we’re Marching forward.

Horatio GIF

With the second month of 2023 firmly behind us, it’s time to discuss the state of stream as this week comes to a close and a new one looms over the horizon. As Dead Space Remake and Metroid Prime Remastered slowly near completion, Bioshock 1 was reintroduced (thankfully with no errors or issues!) and we also began Donkey Kong Country 2 with FamiliarDan. But aside from underwater dystopias and monke related hijinks, the question remains: “What else is new, Toasty?”

February 19, 2023

This Week at the Crumb Club - Feb 19, 2023

This week at the Crumb Club, we’re operating on schedule with the first of a (hopefully!) weekly series of blog posts dedicated to discussing the state of stream in time for the completion of the first weekly streaming schedule I’ve ever posted. The plan is for these posts to follow the completion of any weekly schedule I post and to discuss upcoming changes, new features, and findings from the past week to provide a better experience for the audience and myself as a broadcaster. Think of it like a weekly digest to keep the community up to date on what goes on behind the scenes.

January 7, 2023

Toasty's OBS Setup: Overlays, Chatbots, Moderation, and General Guidelines

On the final part of Toasty’s OBS Setup, we’re going to be going through the tools you need to build a welcoming environment in your stream from overlays to chatbots and a general code of conduct to abide by when you’re on the air so you can help set the tone for your stream that’ll help support the community that you’re helping to build every minute you’re live.

Overlays

Overlays refer to the various on-screen elements that display information about your stream in real-time such as alerts, sound alert redemptions, follower goals, and messages from stream chat. Some of these overlays can also be bundled with free and premium themes that are hosted on services such as Streamlabs and StreamElements. These platforms also offer tools to help you build and customize your overlays that you can then add to your scenes in OBS Studio using Browser Sources which pull information from a user-specified URL and can be placed anywhere on your scenes like any other source. Fine-grained customization of overlays themselves requires some working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make changes without breaking the overlays, though often you’ll find yourself writing more CSS code than anything else.

November 24, 2022

Toasty’s OBS Setup: Touch Portal & Meme Scenes

In the first OBS setup post I published, I made mention of external stream control tools such as the Elgato Stream Deck and how they can greatly streamline and automate aspects of streaming especially if you only have one monitor. Today we’re going to be focusing on one such example that makes streaming much more convenient, only relies on a tablet or smartphone, and enables moments such as this.

Meme Scenes

If you’ll recall part one, we touched on two different types of scenes: Static and Dynamic scenes. Static scenes require no streamer interaction while dynamic scenes require them. Today we’ll be introducing a third type of scene: Meme Scenes. Meme scenes are the name given to scenes such as the example seen above and are typically used to reference or make light of the current situation in response to a certain context. As such, Meme scenes can be seen as something of a happy medium between both dynamic and static scenes that if used properly can make your viewers that much happier for their inclusion and usage.

October 31, 2022

From the Vault: A Guy's View on Halo Infinite, and the perils of covering a live service game.

Editor’s Note: The content of this article reflects the state of Halo Infinite’s live service as of this article’s original publication date: January 18th, 2022. Several changes have been made to the original article to better address grammatical errors and improve readability while adding annotations to correct and update information regarding the game’s state as of October 31st, 2022.

Halo Infinite Cover

I’ve been debating whether or not I should post this article since Halo Infinite’s multiplayer released on November 15th and its campaign on December 8th, but not for the reasons that you might expect. Mainly because I haven’t had the chance to pull myself away from the game long enough to actually elaborate more on my thoughts.

October 15, 2022

Toasty’s OBS Setup: Audio Mixing

Audio mixing is one of the most challenging aspects of streaming to manage and it’s where your setup will diverge wildly from another person’s while also being subject to the most adjustments and tweaks over time. Everyone’s audio environment is highly variable based on a number of different factors and everything from the quality of your microphone to how loud your voice is, to the volume of other audio sources are relative to each other, the acoustics of the room you’re in (including any soundproofing), background noise, and even your own hearing level to name a few possible factors can have beneficial or detrimental effects on how your stream sounds to your viewers. Proper audio mixing can ensure greater auditory clarity for viewers and is tremendously helpful for those who are hard of hearing, leading to an overall better experience that’ll keep your viewers coming back to you.

September 21, 2022

Toasty's OBS Setup: Recommended Hardware & Scene/Source Layout

Introduction

A week ago, I ran a stream talking about my streaming setup going over everything from audio mixing to my scene layouts as a way to help a couple people out who asked how I set things up on OBS and as a way to say “thank you” and give back to the community that helped me become a Twitch affiliate. To all members of the Crumb Club new and old, there’s no way I could’ve done this without you and the community you all helped build. Thank you all so much for tuning in, following, chatting, lurking, and spreading word of our doughy deeds, the best is yet to crumb and I can’t wheat for you all to see what’s in store for the future of the channel!