What:    A Python / Arduino based Twitch bot platform allowing chat to play the Player Unkown’s Battlegrounds communally

When:   July 2017 - December 2017

Where: Previously accessible through Twitch Plays Battlegrounds channel

Who:     Me – Python, Arduino, Twitch API

Why:     Explore the ‘Twitch Plays’ community gaming format in a unique settings

Twitch Plays PUBG was an idea that was born out of more than anything else, curiosity. As the most popular game being streamed on Twitch at the time, and the unique versatility of viable play-styles, what happens when a collective hive mind is placed behind the controls? Is it even possible? I decided to find out how well the Twitch collective could perform.

Implementation Highlights

Building and revising the bot to play

• Twitch chat API was used to process my channel’s chat feed to translate commands into keyboard and mouse input

• A command processing check was implemented to handle the chat input from thousands of participants at once via a ranked voting system

• The hosting server was set up to run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, which required providing commands to the community to navigate through PUBG UI elements and error screens in the early beta state of PUBG

Challenges

Circumventing first person shooting mouse emulation prevention

• PUBG is centered around not only key strokes, but raw mouse input values

• Chat commands were processed through Python, and send to a pair of microcontrollers, which in turn converted them to authentic mouse inputs to send back to the computer to control the PUBG camera