Workout Routine, Twitch Extension

For a bit over a year, I was a fitness streamer on Twitch;  I streamed my workouts live on the platform and interacted with viewers of my stream during the process.

Questions I would often get from viewers while streaming were: “What exercise are you doing today?”, “How many sets of this are you doing?”, and “Just got here. What exercises did I miss?”

To help myself, and other fitness streamers that were surely being asked the same repetitive question, I decided to create an overlay "Twitch Extension" to display workout information over the stream video.

Twitch Extensions are interactive overlays and panels, that enhance the viewing experience on Twitch.  They can be developed by anyone, and once approved by Twitch’s External Developer team, can be used on any channel.  

Extensions can do things like display a streamer’s video game statistics, display donation goals in realtime, and allow users to participate in trivia games hosted by streamers. Extensions are basically apps or widgets that you have for your smartphone, except they only apply to Twitch streams. Just like with mobile apps, the possibilities for extensions are endless.

"Workout Routine" is an extension I ideated and created that allows viewers to follow along with the progress of a streamer's workout.

I solely designed, developed, and deployed the Workout Routine extension.

I used the "TwitchDev" Discord server to ask questions and receive feedback on my ideas.

Because this was my first experience working with certain AWS services like API Gateway and DynamoDB, I used the "Build a Serverless Web Application" guide and the "Twitch-Extension-EBS-AWS-Tutorial" Github repo as tutorials/walkthroughs.

My goal was to create an overlay extension that gave viewers information on streamers’ workouts.  (An overlay extension is one that displays over part of the stream video.)  The extension would provide information like the exercise name, how many sets and/or reps of the exercise were being performed, the rest period, and the muscles that the exercises were targeted.

Just like how the score, time remaining, and number of timeouts are persistently shown as an overlay on any football or baseball  broadcast to keep TV viewers in-the-know, the Workout Routine extension was to give stream viewers an insight into the details of the streamers' workout.

The extension would be launched in the "Twitch Extension Store" so any streamer could access it and easily add it to their stream.

Some specific goals for the extension were to:

Creating the Workout Routine and receiving a positive response from both fitness streamers and viewers has led me to work on creating a new extension, one for interval training (mockup immediately below).

Once this extension is completed & launched, I'll be sure to a new page here on my portfolio about the project!