Let your viewers control your stream (bits, subs, channel points)

*NEW ACHIEVEMENT EFFECT IS AVAILABLE NOW. SEE BOTTOM OF POST TO DOWNLOAD!*

Last time I explained how you can make your stream stand out more by adding your heart rate to it by using your Apple Watch. In this tutorial we’re going to take it even further to make your stream more engaging and interactive for your viewers. How about you let your mods change to your game scene with just a simple command? Or perhaps giving your viewers the ability to give you your very own personalized achievement? Want to know how to do this and more? Well read on!

In this tutorial we’re mainly focusing on actions with channel points, but you can use this method to trigger stuff via bits, subs or other Twitch triggers as well. In order to connect channel points to these effects, we’re going to be using a tool called Lioranboard. In essence what this tool does, it listens to things people do on stream, be it cheering, subscribing or redeeming channel points and it then taps into OBS to control scenes and sources.

In order for the connection with OBS to be made, you’ll also need a separate plugin, called the Websocket Remote control. Download and install that to OBS. If you don’t know how to install plugins, I suggest watching the video I made on that topic. Now as with most custom plugins, this doesn’t work with Streamlabs OBS, so if you want to use it… maybe just switch to regular OBS.

After you’ve installed that plugin, it’s time to download Lioranboard. Now what makes Lioranboard a pretty versatile app is that it also functions as a free Stream Deck alternative. So if you don’t own a Stream Deck, this tool might be even more useful for you. The only downside is that it requires an Android phone, or tablet to work, or you’ll need it open on your PC. This tutorial is not going to cover the Stream Deck portion of the app, but I did want to mention the possibility!

When you download the Lioranboard zip file and extract it, you’ll get presented with several files. First off we have 3 folders. The first one is the most important one as that’s the receiver which we’re going to focus on today. The other 2 folders are for the stream deck portion of the app that I just mentioned. 

Let’s go into the receiver folder and open the .exe file. When you do this for the first time, you’ll get a nifty tutorial that helps you set things up. One of the things you’ll set up first is the OBS websocket. Remember that plugin we installed earlier? This is where we’re going to use that. Most likely if you didn’t make any changes in the websocket plugin, you can leave this all to default, but if you run into any issues, you can check the settings in OBS, by going to the tools menu and then select “Websocket Server Settings”.

When you’ve entered the websocket data, you’ll want to check the “Autoconnect to OBSws” and “Autoconnect to Twitch” boxes. This saves you the hassle of having to connect manually everytime you’re going live. You can leave the non-blocking connection checkbox unchecked. Lastly frames per second is also an important one to fill in. You’re going to want to set this to the same number of frames per second you output when streaming. Most likely this is 30 or 60. If you don’t know, you can check this in OBS by going to settings > video and then check the number that shows up there!

Once you’ve done that hit “accept”. Next up we’re going to connect to Twitch. There’s 2 buttons here. First click the “Link your Twitch” button. This will open a window with a URL in it. Copy that URL and open it in your browser. You’ll get the screen below where it’ll ask you to authorize your Twitch connection. Basically what this allows is the Lioranboard app to check your stream data for the triggers we’ve mentioned earlier. Scroll down and click authorize and you should get a message saying it went well.

Now after that you’re probably very inclined to press the “Connect to Twitch” button. Well I feel you, but just hold on for a minute, because the app is going to give you an error telling you to connect the TSL transmitter. Now I don’t know what this does, but I *DO* know how to connect it. Back in the Lioranboard folders you also saw an HTML file called “TSL_Transmitter.html”. All you have to do is go to OBS and make a browser source for this file. Now we’re not gonna show it or use it ever, it just needs to be there, so go ahead and hide it somewhere in a scene you never use, so it’s just out of the way.

When you’ve done all this and you have OBS open, you should see these 3 buttons now greyed out, meaning everything works. Well done, the hardest part is now over!

Now for the fun stuff! Because now we can actually make some integrations! You’ve probably already seen the example boards on the main screen. These are all fine and dandy, but we don’t need any hand holding right? So click on “add new deck” to start a brand new deck. Now you’ll see an empty deck with spaces to add the buttons to. Right click on one of these spaces and choose “create blank button”. Now like I said before this can also work as a Stream Deck alternative, so when you right click on one of the new buttons you’ll see things like “add sound effects” or “add keyboard macro” but the thing we really care about is “Add commands”. Click that and you’ll see the page where you can add new commands. Here we can add all the triggers we want to use. For this first example, I’m gonna do something very simple, namely we’re just going to change a scene. Click on the little plus icon and there you’ll see all the options that Lioranboard has.

In this case we’re first going to use “scene switch”. Here we can select the scene that we want to switch to. So let’s say I’m enjoying my game, but I’m still on my intermission screen. Then people can shout at me in chat telling me to change the scene, or they can just do it themselves. Click ‘Done’ once ready!

So we’ve set up the command, but now it doesn’t listen to anything, it just sits there. In order for your viewers to actually trigger it, we go back and right click again on our button, but this time we select “add Twitch triggers”. Click on the plus sign and again you’ll see all the options that you can use. These include most things Twitch offers, like bits, subs, gifted subs but also point redeems and even extension triggers. For this example we’re going to select “chat message”. Here you can see the options you have for who can trigger this. Now keep in mind that these options are absolute, meaning that if you want both subs AND mods be able to trigger this, you’ll need to have 2 separate triggers. If you were to check both Mod and Sub in this, the tool only listens to people who are both subscribed to your channel AND are also moderator.

So we first make the mod trigger and we make it listen to !gamescene. After that, we make the sub trigger and again make it listen to the same thing. Now both our subs and our mods can change the scene to the game scene from whatever scene you started in. Last you want to check the “add to request queue” box. What this does is, imagine multiple people trigger your effect, instead of it restarting mid-way, it stacks them and queues them up one after another.

Be sure to click done in this window, and also in your new deck, otherwise things won’t get saved! If you want to test it yourself, you might want to add another temporary trigger for yourself as broadcaster, so you can try it out while you’re not live.

Obviously this is a very basic example and not very useful in reality, unless you trust your subs to never troll with you… So let’s have a look at my Achievement Unlocked effect.

For this I first created the animation of the Achievement. If you want to use the same animation, you can download it at the bottom of this blog! I put the animation in a new scene in OBS, together with the achievement sound and a new Text GDI+ source. Make sure that you position the animation where you want it to be and the Text GDI+ source on top of that. Also for the text source you want to give it a set width and height so that it covers your animation and it doesn’t overflow. Now make sure that in the properties of both the animation as the sound effect you tick “Restart playback when source becomes active”. Lastly, when everything is positioned well, set the sources to invisible. You then want to add this scene as a nested scene source to all other scenes where this effect can be triggered.

Now in Twitch you want to set a channel point redemption, give it the amount of points you want it to cost and make sure people need to enter text with it. 

Next in Lioranboard, you want to make a new button, and add the above commands to it. I’m not going over all the individual options, but in short what this does is, it uses “math trigger pull” to grab the message from the redemption and then it adds that message to the text source we just created. After that it basically makes the achievement animation and sound source active so they start playing and after exactly 1,75 seconds it also makes the text source active. Then lastly after the set times it makes all sources inactive again, ready for the next person to trigger them.

Finally we need to add the Twitch trigger to the button. For this, I chose “Point Redeem with Message”. In the first box you need to enter the name of your channel point redemption. Make sure you copy the name exact, with capitals and everything, otherwise it won’t work. The message box you can leave the * in it. Hit done and done and that’s it. You can now go ahead and try to trigger your redemption and it should play in OBS.

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Have you created a cool integration with Lioranboard on your stream? Or perhaps you’ve used the Achievement Unlocked file below and changed it to fit your style? I’d love to see the things you create with this, so feel free to share it. Join our Discord where you’ll be able to share your creations in the “#Showcase” channel!

If you’d like to create an Achievement Unlocked animation for your own streams, you can download the source file I used to create this animation for free below.

If you want to share this file with others, please share the link to this blog post and *NOT* the file itself.

If it helps you and you’d like to support me and my content, you can leave a voluntary donation as well. Please note this is absolutely voluntary and all donations go towards improving my content.

NEW XBOX ACHIEVEMENT EFFECT

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you. If you’d like to watch the video version of this Quick Stream Tip, you can head over to my YouTube channel (where you’ll actually find many more tips and other videos)!