Well 2023 seems to have been and gone in a flash! I am in the middle of my usual annual break over the Christmas / New Year period after a busy weekend of two streams that totalled up to 12 hours of content having not long got better from a mild dose of COVID, and as you will see work is well underway for getting things ready for an exciting new year!
Since the summer, I have been working on a visual refresh of the stream and a project that has taken the various parts that have been built up over the time since I started streaming in mid-2016 – including the sub badges, emotes, channel points and Discord, to give them a more consistent and unified feel.
Inspired by my visit to Whitby in July, I have settled on the theme of a cosy tea rooms which will be part of a brand new look to the start / end of stream and be right back loops, a brand new theme to our sub badges and a refreshed set of emotes that match the overall art style that has been created for us, retaining some inspiration from the original set that were created for us by our friend AmericanVikingJohn.
To realise the new vision, I commissioned itsHalfPint who created all the emotes and artwork for another of our streamer friends DaddyWisdom, and I could not be happier with the end result. You are starting to see some of the end results of that work this week, with the upload of the brand new style emotes to the Twitch channel and Discord, along with a brand new set of sub badges for subscribers to the channel. This has included the first set of animated emotes being commissioned for the channel, and more will be added over the opening months of 2024! Also, the panel header images on the Twitch page have also had a new design to fit with the new theme and style.
Together with these visual refreshes, there have also been updates to the Discord and some of the stream features to incorporate the new theme. The Discord going forward will be known as The Tea Rooms, with updates to the channel names with this theme being made in mind over the past several months. The role covering newer members of the Discord has also been renamed, from Cadets to Snackers.
Over on the stream, there are new names for both sets of loyalty systems. For the Twitch Channel Points system, these have gone from being ‘Bolts’ to tea leaves, whilst the bot loyalty currency has been renamed from the very generic ‘CJ Coins’ to teabags. I have also taken the opportunity to tweak some of the Twitch Channel Point rewards, in particular those that interacted between the two sets of currencies. The ratio of tea leaves to teabags has been changed from a direct 1:1 conversion to 5 tea leaves per tea bag – so you will find new redemptions to swap for 200, 1,000, 2,000 and 10,000 teabags accordingly. The Streamloots cards that allowed you to earn bonus bot currency have been kept at their previous values and simply renamed accordingly.
Finally, this website has had a little bit of a style refresh to fit the new look – I hope you like the new colour scheme, and find the new font choice – Merriweather Sans, a bit easier and more legible to read. It’s still a little in progress and I’m sure will continue to evolve slightly into the new year, but the bulk of the changes have been made, and I hope you like them!
Clearly this is all a very large undertaking to refresh so many elements over the space of a week – especially with a trip up to York for a community meet up in the days leading up to the New Year, so hopefully there won’t be too many rough edges when I return for my first stream of 2024, which is planned for Wednesday 3rd January!
I hope you have all had a fantastic Christmas with your friends and families, and wish you all a safe and peaceful start to the new year, can’t wait to get the new year and to some extent, a new era, underway!