We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Autif Kamal a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Autif, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

To stream on Twitch you need to learn how to use OBS. And then, you need to know how to add sources to capture gameplay and your webcam. That is the minimum required to stream on Twitch. But, doing the minimum doesn’t mean that your stream will be optimum. To optimize my stream, I had to play with framerates for my specific computer and bitrates to make sure that users viewing get a viewable stream (as in not pixelated) but then also so that the bitrate and FPS (frames per second) are not so high that as a user, you keep seeing a buffering stream.

When I first tried to stream in 2015, I gave up pretty quickly because I simply didn’t know how to start. So, I would say that OBS may look daunting, but don’t give up. Look up some getting started or OBS for beginners tutorials and you’ll be fine.

The skills essential for streaming on Twitch besides knowing how to broadcast from OBS is conversing both with yourself (when chat is not active) and with chat when people, making your stream interactive and engaging, and being disciplined. Especially when starting out, you will not always have people chatting in your channel. It’s important to keep talking even when no one is there because if you’re not talking, then people won’t know whether to be interested in you as a person. It’s important to talk with chat because what’s unique about streaming on Twitch versus just watching a YouTube video is that you can have a live conversation and connect with people. It makes the experience more personal. Twitch has a channel rewards system and there are bots like Mix It Up and Firebot to make custom channel rewards. You can give chatters the power to have pretty much anything happen on your stream.

Also, its important to have alerts when people subscribe to your channel, give you bits, or raid. Its important to show appreciation and recognition of people when they support your channel. Whether they support it in monetary form or just provide you company while you game.

The only obstacles that stood in my way of learning more was having never streamed before. The best way to learn is to just do it and learn by trial and error. Make friends with other small streamers on Twitch and you will learn from them and they will learn from you because everyone has a somewhat different experience on Twitch based on how they approach it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I first got into Twitch in April 2019. The first game that I streamed was Dark Souls 3. I started off with just my friends who I knew in person watching my stream. After I completed Dark Souls 3, I started another game called Sekiro and someone random popped into my stream, they made friends with me and connected me with their friends circle and with that more people watched me.

At the end of the day, I play videogames and I broadcast that and I also upload a lot of videos on YouTube. People who come to my channel come to hang out and chat with me and other chatters. Some come just for the game, but everyone mostly come to hang out which I appreciate.

As far as my accomplishments, I have over 900 followers on Twitch, over 4000 subscribers on YouTube and over 1700 followers on TikTok. Generally, I average about 10 viewers per hour. I am considered a small streamer and I’m okay with that. Coming from nothing, I still greatly appreciate these accomplishments.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I first started streaming on Twitch, I streamed variety. That means that there wasn’t a particular game that I stuck with. That can make it difficult to build viewership because whenever you switch games, you will likely lose a lot of viewers who came specifically for that game. Therefore, if you pick a game and stick with it, you’ll retain the viewers who are hardcore for those games. I eventually switched to and focused on something called Kaizo Mario. The version of kaizo mario I play is based on Super Mario World. Kaizo in Japanese basically just means to arrange. In a Kaizo Mario romhack, creators rearrange Super Mario World assets to make difficult levels. The way I like to compare Kaizo Mario is like Super Mario World and doing skateboard tricks, but instead of a skateboard, you’re doing drinks with shells, springs, saws, boos, etc. Focusing on Kaizo Mario was helpful in becoming known and connecting to a community.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Initially, I tried to post longer videos on YouTube with little success. The videos I was posting were from 10 to 15 minutes in length. Then, YouTube came up with YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts is basically YouTube’s version of TIkTok. However, at least right now, videos will not be longer than 1 minute in length. When you do make gameplay based videos for YouTube Shorts and TikTok, you’ll want to do two things. Pick what kind of content you want to post (e.g. Clips from Kaizo Mario hacks) and post those daily. That way, anyone watching your content knows what to expect. Also, make sure that you format your videos for mobile. Assuming you are showing your webcam and gameplay, you want one half of your video to be allocated for the former and the other half to be allocated to the latter. Streamladder is a free and useful web application to help you format your gameplay videos for mobile.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.twitch.tv/MinisterGold
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/minister_gold
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/MinisterGold
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@ministergold https://stream-machine.podbean.com/

Image Credits
First image credited to Dangil. The rest credited to me.