David Sherlock
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2025–ongoing

Twitch Games - Harold & Olympus

A local OBS browser overlay where chat plays a ridiculous retro text adventure together: wandering around, voting on directions, fighting bosses, racing, doing pub quizzes, and slowly becoming an adventuring mob with levels and grudges.

I wanted an OBS overlay where chat becomes one adventure party. People type commands in Twitch or YouTube chat to wander a small retro world, pick fights with Harold Bishop or Zeus, race, answer a quiz, and occasionally ruin it by backstabbing the boss.

It started as Chat vs Harold Bishop and grew into a little stream game with no build step: PHP, a database, ordinary JavaScript, and a browser source pointed at the overlay. The browser owns the live game. PHP saves stats and polls YouTube. Twitch can be anonymous. The database can be off and the game still plays, which is about right for something you might fiddle with five minutes before going live.

Movement voting, boss phrases, a tape-loader screech, a fake 3D race: the odd bits are the point. Balance, chat lag, and local setup are still rough.

The mashup

Twitch chat driving a text adventure on an OBS overlay, with YouTube chat mixed in.

AI-generated guess of the mashup mix, 1 to 5. Click a stat.

Twitch 5/5: Chat commands drive the overlay. No login needed on that path.

Tags

funcursortwitchyoutubeobschat-gametext-adventurephpmysqlretrostream-overlaymashup

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Notes to self for media to add
  • Hero image: OBS-style screenshot of the overlay mid-boss fight, with command bar, adventurers roster, drama phrase, and a big stupid boss sprite.
  • Screenshots: dashboard game selector, title screen crawl, adventure room, boss fight HP bar, race, quiz, Simon game, and Hall of Fame.
  • Short demo video: 45-60 seconds showing !start, movement, !look, loot, a boss fight, chat attacks, fireworks, and tape reload.
  • YouTube Short: vertical cut of chat trying to defeat Zeus or Harold, with captions over the chaos.
  • Moments worth capturing: secret Hera or Mrs Mangel encounter, ZX Spectrum tape reload, race wipeout, boss healing, and level-up banners.