EPTHi, my name is Partouf, I'm a software developer outside of when I observe games of Starcraft 2 for BasetradeTV. I have observed games for various Zotac weeklies, monthlies, Kaspersky arena's, showmatches and a couple of Acer Teamstory Cup days. I'm not the greatest next pro-observer, nor would I ever claim or want to be. However, I do wanted to write about my ongoing experiences and share some tips I have been able to apply in trying to get better at this thing called observing.
Everything here is just from my own perspective and personal experiences. Mixed in with my own way of dealing with things I sometimes I wish I could take the Starcraft 2 source and write an auto-director for, but instead I'm stuck with having to deal with being human and making mistakes.
Before you start off randomly reading this, go read this blog by Adebisis first.
Every observer has his own style, but I try to take away whatever I can from watching games observed by Infeza (IEM/WCS/ACL), Funka (WCS) and Kuren (Clarity gaming/IvD). If you wanna see how good Starcraft 2 can be, watch games observed by these people.
Dramatic introduction (TLDR: SC2 is pretty cool)
+ Show Spoiler +
In a world where everything is on the move, improving and decaying every second, the StarCraft 2 e-sports scene still seems to be evolving at the rate of a snail sliding along its way without actually knowing where it's going. Sometimes that's perfectly fine, life is a journey after all, and if you're trying to achieve a goal, you'll always be searching for a new goal and maybe never be happy at all. That's not to say we cannot improve without cherishing our audience and making things as comfortable as can be for their – and thus our – entertainment.
Nobody nor their technologies are perfect, we can demand in-game spectating for everyone from Blizzard, but it's unlikely we'll get it. So we're stuck with having someone stream for us their perspective of the game, like having a camera swoosh all over the sports-stadium and watch the ball or players smash onto each other and score some points. The camera can't see everything on the field without the players appear like ants, nor can we ask the commentators to comment on every little thing that could influence the game.
I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say StarCraft 2 has so much moving parts that you can never really bring it all together on cast and camera. Not only are terrain, movements and attacks important, but also actions and preparations that happened minutes earlier important to push the game into someone's favor. It's never really robotic mechanics either that make someone a good or bad player either, the smallest of strategic actions, movement and micro actions can help you win or lose a match and give that signature flavor to a player.
So I thought, how can I improve entertainment value to help show viewers how exciting this game can be without having to put all the weight on the caster's shoulders. Could I learn to observe SC2 games, even with my own limited gameplay knowledge?
Nobody nor their technologies are perfect, we can demand in-game spectating for everyone from Blizzard, but it's unlikely we'll get it. So we're stuck with having someone stream for us their perspective of the game, like having a camera swoosh all over the sports-stadium and watch the ball or players smash onto each other and score some points. The camera can't see everything on the field without the players appear like ants, nor can we ask the commentators to comment on every little thing that could influence the game.
I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say StarCraft 2 has so much moving parts that you can never really bring it all together on cast and camera. Not only are terrain, movements and attacks important, but also actions and preparations that happened minutes earlier important to push the game into someone's favor. It's never really robotic mechanics either that make someone a good or bad player either, the smallest of strategic actions, movement and micro actions can help you win or lose a match and give that signature flavor to a player.
So I thought, how can I improve entertainment value to help show viewers how exciting this game can be without having to put all the weight on the caster's shoulders. Could I learn to observe SC2 games, even with my own limited gameplay knowledge?
0. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid
Probably the most important part of the learning process, you'll quickly learn this in your first or second game.
I learned to:
- not do anything that you haven't actually practiced
- practice with replays to learn the features you want to use, and to warm up your brain and hands before live casts
1. Rapid movement
When you're used to playing (badly) and start to try out for observing a game, you'll quickly hit some annoying little snag: Scrolling.
Fast scrolling and quick movement is one of the most annoying things to watch at when viewing a game, not only is it bad for the stream smoothness quality, it's also physically exhausting for the viewer when they're not even doing anything themselves. It demands from the viewer to follow and adjust their eyes and attention to things that don't actually matter. And yet, the default settings on SC2 prevent you from having a stable environment. Even when you try your best, you'll eventually hit the sides of the screen and move the camera all over the place.
When you actually do need to move slightly, to adjust view (hopefully as little as possible) or to follow units, and you want to use the manual mouse-scroll-button option, you can accidentally zoom in, and well, ruin things.
To get as little movement as possible, traveling the map is best be done through clicking on the minimap. And maybe equally important, to click accurately to get the best point of view without having to move again afterwards. You can always adjust, but it still can influence the viewability of the stream.
Last, but not least, accidentally (or as some casters do on purpose) dragging your mouse over the minimap moves your view way too fast and erratic to do anyone good. Unfortunately, you can't do much about this, except for practicing to improve your accuracy and steadiness.
I learned to:
- disable mousewheel zoom-scroll and mouse side-scroll
- practice accurately point-clicking the minimap to move the camera
2. Out of game complications
When observing, you'll be likely streaming from your PC as well, which comes with extra complications on top of the actual observing.
Occasionally you may have to verify or click something in your streaming application, or perhaps open chat or a website on the other screen. I myself play SC2 in fullscreen windowed mode, with mouse confinement on. This way you have to hit alt-tab (or the windows key) to swap to a different application. While observing this causes some extra glitches and inefficiencies you'd rather not have the viewers – or yourself – to experience. Even more so if you kept the mouse side-scroll feature on. Accidental scrolls to the left or right side of the map have happened more than once in the history of amateur SC2 casts, so if we can do something about it, we should.
I learned to:
- disable Mouse cursor confinement
- disable Alt-Tab shortcut
- disable Windows key (if your keyboard has one on the left side)
4. GameHeart practices
GameHeart is a marvelous both custom map and regular Observer interface. It gives everyone a clean and direct view into important game information throughout the game, that you'd normally only see by selecting the specific tabs like upgrades, resources and income. Also extra information like match score and a units lost panel is available. Each of these options come with practicing all the hotkeys and to learn when to use them or not.
I learned to:
- learn the hotkeys, and have the F11 help screen as a screenshot out of game just in case
- press Escape occasionally on idle moments so the viewer can see income, resources lost and APM while being able to keep the production tab open
- not show the Units lost or Resources lost panel when I'm not sure if the panel will cover important parts of the screen (or maybe not at all, because they're pretty ugly)
5. Mouse movements
It's easy to fall back into the role of player and wanting to select units in order to control them, even though as an observer you cannot.
Accurate selection of single units, ctrl- or shift- selecting units or building are useful to summarize counts or see the general health-pool. Even boxing units can be useful, to show a combination of different units close together. But you can also fall into the trap to box everything you see with way too large rectangles of green without having an actual purpose. It can also impact the speed in which you are able to react to other things happening on the mini map, because you have to move the mouse cursor all the way back again.
I learned to:
- consider first if it's useful to select something before you move your mouse
- if really needed, only to make small boxes that are just enough to select moving units
- don't be too wildly active with pointing, circling or boxing (even though you might be extremely excited about something)
6. Zooming
Aside from zooming in, tilting and swiveling the camera view, which you probably shouldn't use at all, there's a great useful feature that enables you to zoom further out and get a larger overview of the playing field.
It's important to not only anticipate when to zoom out, preferably before the actual engagement happens, but also to remember to switch it back to normal. The zoom-out is powerful, but can also cause temporary larger bit-rates and blurriness of the stream.
I learned to:
- anticipate unit setups and surrounds to zoom-out for
- carefully center the zoomed-out view with as little movement possible
- not leave the zoom-out on for too long
7. The subject of Healthcare, erm I mean Health-bars
Can we talk about this? I'd rather not, because pretty much everyone has a different opinion about which setting to use. I curse the day this option was introduced. No I don't mean the Team colored bar option, nobody should be using that, but the When-to-show option.
I personally went, and am still going for, the option of Damaged health-bars. This because it's not as messy as the Always on option, and you don't have to focus on which units when you have to show the health-bars of with the Selected option.
As a player I like to see everything, so even with the Damaged health-bars I feel “out of control”, because I can't visually confirm units/buildings are actually 100% health.
Other observers, I know, do prefer the Selected option to show a clean view of the battlefield, but it puts extra multitask pressure on the observer to be aware of what, when and how to select certain units or buildings. When you're just starting off and haven't gotten enough feel of selecting/alting correctly in combat or chaotic situation (I at least can't do it yet), just use damaged health-bars.
8. Custom controls
As already hinted in Adebisi's blog about observing, you will need a different set of hotkeys for your observing from the defaults or your playing profile. Things like the follow and vision keys are important to keep near and available without having to look on your keyboard.
During practice and live testing your hotkeys you might also stumble against hotkeys you Don't want to use. If keys are too close together, you might unintentionally hit a key that makes the screen jump all over the place. Depending on what keys you use in-game and for your streaming application, you will probably need to find out yourself the hard way which keys can cause harm to the viewer's experience.
I learned to:
- bind Follow current selection to f
- unbind spacebar - Jump to last alert
9. Gameplay
Now we got the technical nitty gritty out of the way, we can go to the important stuff: actually observing the game. Must be easy, right? No, not really. The higher level the games, the harder the observing gets. Not only because there's more battles going on, but mostly because just about every action and inaction is significant to the progression of the game.
Early game
Every matchup and every player has its own approach and builds to look out for and identify. Having a basic knowledge of every race, their tech-tree options, general concept of costs and basic buildorders for all matchups are the minimal requirements of observing the early game.
Keep your eyes open on the where workers are going, how high the money gets, what the first building choices are. Following some critters or overlords is cool, but identifying what the players are doing is more important.
Minimap, minimap, minimap
Let me say first what I learned, and then explain why this time.
I learned to:
- always keep watching the minimap, no matter what's going on
- prioritize fights and situations despite wanting to see everything
- don't get lost in the game
- don't get tunnel-visioned on checking out bases, tech or battles
Basically these things are more or less the same, but it's harder to execute than on paper. We're not watching Starcraft because it's our job or being forced to, we watch it because we love the game and get crazy excited when we see crazy things happen on the screen. It's easy to get lost in the excitement, or get tunnel-visioned on trying to figure out what a player is doing.
In my experience, it's important to keep your eyes and priorities in order to entertain the viewers and not yourself per se. Always keeping an eye on the minimap after you switched to battles, make sure the viewers have a clear view on what's going on, including things that might indicate who's winning the current battle – be it resources lost, pressing escape if using Gameheart, units lost, zooming out, or following units retreating or advancing. Always keep checking or keep in mind what's going on elsewhere on the field, when an opportunity arises, take the viewer to the next best thing.
If multiple drops are going on, make the viewer understand those are going on, but make sure you get the closest drop first. If two fights are going on, but one of them is just units attacking a building, prioritize the units battle with units fighting eachother – but don't forget about the dying buildings, they might be important in terms of upgrades or unit production and the viewer needs to know that's going on.
Minimap struggles
There's a lot of things I'm still struggling quite a bit on when it comes to multiple points of interest in exciting games, but I've noticed other observers have similar problems.
The first one is continuously returning to areas that seem important on the minimap, but don't show important activity when you actually go there. Be it an observer or overlord over the opponents territory or a single marine attacking a building – you need to prioritize your view that contains the most information at the time, and resist the urge to keep going back to the same spot.
Another struggle I keep having is timing out widowmine cooldowns and going back to that spot, only to find out the mine has already killed another few units without you seeing it.
Third one is getting caught up in battles, forgetting to keep an eye on production, and suddenly spotting units that you didn't expect. Spotting tech choices and swaps are an important part of observing, even though the casters might be talking about, it might not actually sink in and trigger you to keep an eye on what things might be coming. Be it as simple as a couple of hellions, a banshee, or late game units in situations where your ears are still hearing the sounds of constant fights going on. Especially tech switches are important to see and show early, as well as where the units are coming out and where they're heading. Even though you might be catching up on an important battle, you need to focus on the next move the players might be executing. Watch production, watch where the buildings and pylons are and when you have the time: go have a look.
Contradictions
I realize I've been writing down a few things that contradict one another. The problem is that observing a game between two good players can get incredibly complex with a dozen of things going on at the same time. There isn't a clear cut protocol you can follow, but the important thing to get out of this is to prioritize your time spent to getting as much information to the viewer – without actually taking away their enjoyment of the game. Just like when playing the game time spent on things like scrolling, too much clicking, too much mouse movement and concentrating on things that don't matter, they all take away time that should be spent on entertaining your viewers with the game and players that we love.
10. Did I mention Practice?
I certainly need more of it...
How the hell does one obs ZvZ?!
If you have any tips or want to share your experiences, please do!
Enjoy your day :-)
– xxx –
Partouf
