Hosting a round on stream

Playing with your stream means: many people, little time, and everyone is watching. Here's what helps you as the host. The basics of the lobby are in Game options for hosts.

Preparing

• Connect your account to Twitch. Then your Twitch moderators automatically become game moderators, and ColorMari can announce in chat whose picture is being shown. How: Logging in and connecting accounts.
• Set the access. Under Access choose Public (in the lobby browser), Everyone (with a link), a Whitelist or Closed. A public game is listed on the home page, and anyone can join it there - not what you want for a round with just your chat. Anyone on the whitelist automatically becomes a VIP.
• Set a player limit if your chat is bigger than the round you want to show.
• Think of a theme. A good theme gets the chat on board - see The theme of your round and Theme ideas for your round.

Once everyone is in: set access to Closed - then nobody new joins during the game.

Moderators

Game moderators can kick and ban players (not the host), hand out VIP status, force the next round and use the chat commands below. Your Twitch moderators become moderators automatically.

If you have to leave, hand over hosting from someone's menu in the player list: Make Game Master.

Chat commands

In the game's chat, the host and moderators can type commands starting with /:

During the game

The hammer button opens the Game Options:

• Extend time: +1, +2, +5 or +15 minutes. As often as you like, up to two hours after the round started.
• Force next round: when everyone is done or someone stopped responding. You don't have to wait for the clock, and your stream keeps flowing.
• Cancel game: with a reason everyone sees.

The reveal

The reveal is the moment everyone has been drawing towards - and the best part of your stream. Before it starts, you can set:

• Voice output (TTS): the sentences are read aloud.
• Random Order: the books come up shuffled.
• Twitch Chat Announcement of the artist: with every picture, ColorMari links the artist's profile in chat.

Then click Start watching and step through picture by picture. Each sentence comes first, then the drawing plays as a video. Take your time: read the sentence out, let the chat guess, laugh together. And if a picture is still being prepared, the button waits until it's ready.

Check before your viewers see it: with Open preview window (on the start page, and the eye button beside the picture) a small window of its own shows you what comes next before you press play: the next drawing or the next text ("Next up, a text by ..."). Keep it out of what your streaming software captures, and you see everything first - should something be in it your stream should not show, you know before it plays. You can close it any time. In Chrome and Edge it stays on top of everything, in other browsers it opens as a pop-up (allow pop-ups for ColorMari if nothing happens).

With Skip this text or Skip this drawing you leave the next item out of the reveal. Show the skipped one after all undoes the last skip. Skipping only leaves it out of the show; the drawing stays its author's.

At the end, Next game keeps it going: it opens a new lobby with the same settings, and after five seconds everyone is taken there automatically.