Naruto Game show project breakdown
This is the project that I was making for almost the entirety of May. It was for the “Whatnot Card Show IV”, an online event on a streaming platform for collectibles and other items. Before the project, the platform hosted its series of live game shows which inspired me to make a similar style in the “Naruto cards” streaming category.
With all the stars aligning I had a strict June 1st deadline, which meant I had about a month for everything.
Part 1 The plan
The first week I was writing notes and planning out the flow of the show, what would be the prizes, questions, what to say, ideas, memes. Some of the planned ideas initially thought of never materialized for one or multiple reasons. the short end of the plan was like this:
1) 5-minute looping animation for the start of the stream to let viewers accumulate
2) introduction where I explain the rules, and let people know about the main prize
3)Ask Naruto Trivia and react to the poll results accordingly(correct or incorrect)
4)Have a gameshow outro into an additional scene promoting Hatsune Miku boxes
5)After the gameshow transfer back to the regular streaming setup for sales.
These are the notes i made to plan the game show. Some of them didn’t come to fruition.
Part 2 Let's get to work
First thing that I wanted to do after the plan is to make a looping animation for the first 5 minutes of the stream.
I had a couple of ideas in mind and made several variants with various stages of completion. For this part, I was using Cinema 4D with Redshift to make renders. At this stage, I solidified that I wanted to Prerecord myself asking and reacting to the questions because I didn’t have anyone to manage the show using seller tools effectively, which I just wouldn’t be able to do on my own if I was performing live.
Still and animated renders made in Cinema 4D and rendered in Redshift.
Some renders weren’t used in the final show, but were still usefull
Part 3 Pretend I'm live
The main question I had for myself was about how I would somewhat naturally transition between asking the questions and giving a proper reaction if viewers answered correctly or not. My solution to this problem was to have a pose that I would transition from somewhat naturally, which became a pose where I held my hands up to my chin and looked up as if I were looking at their answers. I would end up using Stream Deck to turn on footage that was following the poll answers. With that in mind in the editing software of Adobe Premiere Pro, I divided the footage into 3 categories: Positive, negative, and neutral. At first, I thought I would be turning on questions and answers manually through stream deck but running a quick test on some raw footage proved that that wouldn’t be very easy to pull off during live and needlessly complicated the background flow. The solution to that was to add the next question to both reactions of the last quiz. This way during live stream i had time to prepare the poll and run giveaways easing the load on me. For question 10 I had 3 scenarios: “All previous questions are correct final prize unlocked”, “Some questions were wrong so instead there’s a chance for a secondary prize”, and “Final question answered incorrectly but here’s a small prize for you”
Part 4 Crunch time and going live
On the day of the stream, I had finished the Game show part of the plan but needed to make the outro and the Miku box promotion. I knew I didn’t have any time for anything polished, so I leaned into a little bit of absurdity and memes. A few hours before the stream i tested the stream deck and OBS setup to make sure everything is working properly.
During the game show live stream, my main role was to time footage properly, run giveaways, and make poll questions, and fortunately it all worked out and people enjoyed the show a lot. After the game show, I went back to the regular streaming setup.
Part 5 Post-mortem
Overall i think the show was a success in giving me more 117% higher sales than my average and exposure but there were some areas i could have improved on. Mainly the marketing, I probably should’ve made more promotional material for the show and posted it every day or every other day on social media.
The intro looping animation also was an area i should’ve spent more time and effort in. It served it’s role of keeping people while others joined, but if i decide to make another game show a new intro will have to be made.
