Experimental Daylight streaming tech lets viewers trigger scares

Zombie Studios' upcoming first-person horror game Daylight may include a feature that allows people viewing streams of the game on Twitch to trigger in-game events using text commands. According to an email received from Daylight publisher Atlus yesterday, the folks at Zombie Studios have developed a means of parsing text commands in a Twitch chat room that then trigger events in the game of Daylight being streamed, a form of multiplayer gameplay that's received a fair bit of attention in light of the overwhelmingly popular "Twitch Plays Pokemon" stream. "The example we've been tossing around (and is in no way final) is that someone watching a stream types the word "Meow" into the chat, which causes the game to make a corresponding sound of a cat," reads the email from Atlus. "You can literally scare your friends now by watching them stream." Atlus representatives stipulate that the team at Zombie are abiding by two rules as they develop this feature: they won't share the full list of words at launch so players can discover them on their own, and all the text triggers will have timers so that stream viewers can't spam them. Gamasutra has reached out to representatives of Atlus and Zombie Studios for further comment and details about the development of this feature. UPDATE: Atlus's John Hardin has confirmed that Zombie Studios has a fully functioning build of Daylight for PlayStation 4 that can parse and react to text commands from viewers of a Twitch livestream. The feature is built using an API provided by Sony that allows developers to accept commands from livestream viewers. "The trickiest part was simply designing [triggerable] events that can effect a player’s game without destroying the experience," wrote John. who went on to point out that since Daylight has procedurally-generated levels -- and procedurally-generated scares -- player-generated events shouldn't prove too incongruous.