What in the blue-hell is an overlay ?!?
This can honestly be a genuine question. Only for the fact I’ve created my own mod for Krunker.io (WxGM) so my interface looks how I want it to look from a colour scheme & textural standpoint, & I worked on UX (User Experience) for a web apps company, I knew what this was. But not everyone does ….
An Overlay is an image, or collection of images or media features that is/are layered on top of a source, like a stream from a game and or a stream from your camera to be used in a final display on a streaming channel such as Twitch, Facebook Live, or YouTube Live. To explain this & work with something familiar, let’s use a still from one of HeyImZed’s recent-ish Twitch streams (Zed’s an Aussie Krunker & other games streamer on Twitch I follow & who helped inspire me into doing this in the first place):
Everything else around the boxes highlighted comes from the game he’s playing (Krunker.io), & those three boxes are layered on top of that game in what is called an overlay. Zed’s isn’t fancy, or flashy — I can’t speak for why, only that his overlay is sparse but functional, & wouldn't need a lot of processing power (from his graphics cards/processor) to use while all of this is happening live as an application, or multiple applications puts together his gaming play, his video, data from Twitch & his live chat on Twitch, which Twitch takes in & then displays on his live stream on his channel.
So why in the hell does this matter? Organizing how your stream is presented to people watching matters just like first impressions. For the first streams I tested with, my overlay was clunky, way WAAAAY too busy, too many hard lines & too many boxes & looked like a fucked up game of celebrity squares.
As I’d selected Gamecaster to be my stream-manager (next blog will be on this topic), I started with one of their templates:
I’d chosen the one I’ve highlighted in purple as the base for creating my first overlay, & as ‘slick’ as it looked, I’ve an older PC than most streamers, & this pounded my processor & my graphics card hard while streaming certain heavy-load games like OverWatch, World of Warcraft, & on games like Krunker where frame-per-second matters.
It was however a good learning experience to learn to play around with a theme already built & tweak parts of it, which given I know my way around a photo editing package or two was easy for me, but for others less savvy than me, this at least gives a good starting point that at least looks good.
I’d iterated on this a number of times, most of which started to become incoherent in their design, overly busy/cluttered & until the last few days have been instead distilled down to this:
Don’t be put off if you aren’t able to do your own graphics. Start as I did, & everyone else does — use either free existing themes with your streaming manager (Gamecaster/OBS etc), & learn how these work, & you can move on to either buying more complex ones to implement or pay someone to design one (this is a blog all of its own at some point about how to find these people & find reliable people for it).
