Following the success of Twitch Plays Pokemon, we wanted to create a game that was built entirely around the engagement of a large community at once. Death’s Door was a Shiny Shoe original game built exclusively for Twitch, in which Twitch chat could vote on what to do next in this fantasy, dungeon crawler text-based RPG. A roguelike structure made the most sense to allow new viewers to pick up quickly on what was going on, with complex RPG mechanics to encourage repeat runs for repeat viewers to deepen their expertise and reward their commitment. Throw in a healthy dose of randomness and Death’s Door carved out a small but loyal community of viewers dedicated to finding a way out of the cursed game.

The game was built in Unity using YarnSpinner to create content quickly and, sometimes, on the fly. Because the game was only run on a single machine at a time and used a heavily extended version of YarnSpinner to produce each text ‘room’ and its logic, we created a tool to inject content in real-time allowing us to respond to chat more organically, and foster more of a ‘streamer’ experience that the game by itself lacked. In the world of Death’s Door, this was always the work of the Dungeon Master (aka me), a nefarious character who appeared occasionally to help and, more often, hinder players’ progress. Where the base game of Death’s Door provided the base for the community to insert into, the Dungeon Master provided the special element to make each stream special and unmissable.

While Death’s Door is no longer streaming, you can read more about the game here.