Tips for Casters and Streamers by Furryfish (Part 1)

With the fame and money that top casters and famous gamers are reputed to receive, it’s no wonder that many gamers are hopping onto the bandwagon and wanting to try their hand at it.

Casting and Streaming almost always come hand in hand. A gamer streaming a normal game is expected to have a microphone attached and keep up an interesting dialogue. The streamer could be talking about what’s happening in game, discussing a current development in the community or could just be reply questions posed in the chat screen.

A caster is almost always streaming the game and talking about it at the same time.

Casting

Casting can be broken down into 2 kinds – to an online audience and to a live audience at LAN

Online casting is less forgiving because people can hear and watch everything very clearly, without being disturbed by cheering crowds, and because VODs can be re-watched. In a cast I did, the audience claimed that they heard me or one of my 2 co-casters let out a burp and they were grumbling about it to the end of the cast (which thankfully was not very long because the said burp was released nearing the end of the cast).

More analysis is also expected, as are insights into the game, gameplay, gamers etc. In my opinion, LAN/Live casting is infinitely more fun because I thrive on audience feedback, and the caster’s job is more about the excitement as opposed to the analysis.

If you want to start casting, you should familiarise yourself with online casting first, because very rarely will you be allowed to grace a LAN event if you have not proven yourself online first. If you’re invited to a LAN event, a big competition will definitely have it streamed online, and all the points about online casting apply, even though you are technically at LAN.

The simplest way to do this is to just set up a stream over at twitch.tv or own3d.tv, hook up a microphone, get a replay, and start on that. You will quickly discover that you’re more partial towards either analysis, or play by play casting. Optimally, casters cast in pairs, with each person taking one of the roles. I myself prefer to do play by plays.

You will also quickly realise that you will need to feel your way around software like xsplit, Photoshop etc as well.

In addition, if you’re casting a DOTA 2 game you might want to consider the following points:

– work on your map awareness, make sure you don’t miss kills and engages

– keep checking items in stash/chick

– in huge engages it’s normal not to be able to talk about everything that’s happening at once. You should instead focus on one important hero and track its movements until its dead or out of engagement, then move on to another hero.

Look out for tips for streamers next!