Curse Innkeeper: A Twitch Extension that makes Hearthstone cards and card mechanics transparent to…

Curse Innkeeper: A Twitch Extension that makes Hearthstone cards and card mechanics transparent to viewers

With 10 million users per day watching content presented by 2.2 million streamers, Twitch is already huge with gamers and game companies. Now, the world’s most popular social video platform and community for video game culture is inviting developers to help it bring streaming to the next level. With Twitch Extensions, developers can unleash their creativity to help augment and enhance the Twitch experience. You can start developing Twitch Extensions here.

Wait — What Just Happened?

Many Twitch viewers are tuning in to learn about new games and about tips and techniques to help them level up in games they already know and love. The problem? Twitch streamers are often advanced players, so it can be hard for less experienced players to notice and understand everything those players are doing.

For example, the more than 70 million worldwide players of Hearthstone enjoy the game for its satisfying complexity. But the down side of that complexity is that it can be hard for Twitch viewers to follow the games if they aren’t familiar with all the cards and their mechanics.

This was the problem Curse set out to solve. Since its founding, Curse has been focused on providing gamers with tools and information that enrich their gaming experience. With the Twitch Extensions platform, Curse saw an opportunity to enrich the experience of game viewers as well — in this case, viewers watching Twitch streamers play Hearthstone.

Twitch Extensions Platform Makes It Easy to Build

Curse used the Twitch Extensions platform to build an Extension called Hearthstone Innkeeper, which provides viewers with card and game information that improves their knowledge of Hearthstone and makes the game even more fun to watch. To build the Extension, Curse accessed tools and sample code on the Twitch Extensions platform that allow two-way communication and interactivity between streamers, viewers, and the games being played.

With these tools, developers can build interactive experiences that live in the panels section of the channel page or — in the case of Innkeeper — right on the video player itself. Free asset hosting and fan-out messaging, as well as a lightweight Extensions Manager, simplify discovery, activation, and management. That makes it easier than ever for developers to connect with users who want their products.

Innkeeper tracks a streamer’s current game and displays details to viewers about both in-hand and in-play cards as an overlay on the video player. By hovering over a card, viewers can see a detailed tool tip that explains its mechanics. If viewers like what they see, they can copy the import string from the overlay and begin using the same deck in their own game.

To simplify development of Innkeeper, Curse based the front and back end of the Extension on the Twitch Extensions boilerplate and added more security checks for tokens used in the game. And when some users pushed back about the size of the Extension’s overlay, the flexible configuration tools available on the Extension-specific settings page made it quick and easy for Curse to hide the overlay until the viewer requests it via mouseover.

What Will You Build?

Get started today with Twitch development. You can explore the Twitch Extensions documentation on this page.