Adventures In Mobile Gaming

Rate My Setup.

Over the course of the past couple of months, I have been traveling for my day job and it got in the way of my standard streaming schedule in a variety of ways. One of which was my lack of a properly equipped system that wasn't property of my full time employer. Without lugging around my tank of a laptop, Lenovo t510, I sought after alternative ways to try to broadcast when I had some downtime while away.

A few months back I was up for an upgrade from my crusty old Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and for moths before that, I anticipated the day so I could grab once of those new fangled "Gaming Phones" just for the purposes of attempting a mobile stream. I've dabbled with a few options on my S7 Edge but it just wasn't powerful enough to not overheat and choke on itself before having a thermal safeguard shutdown. I also had to make sure I wasn't going to break the bank, so immediately, the Asus ROG Phone was right out of the running. (Besides, it wasnt out yet...) That brought me to the final 2 devices: Razer Phone and Xiaomi Blackshark. Obviously, the main pic shows which phone I decided on but this was about the journey and not me blabbing on about the finer points of why I chose one device over the other... So let's get on with it!

After deciding on the Xiaomi Blackshark with the additional snap in Bluetooth controller, I was all set to start gaming. Trying out different combinations of playing some games with and without Shark Space enabled (a specialized gaming mode, turned on at a flip of a switch...) I quickly realized how good this mode is! One thing in particular is the ability to map keys to the 2 L buttons and analog stick. This is very convenient for certain games that you can't/shouldn't input with an "external" device. Pubg Mobile plays like a dream, in that respect!

After a while I started running into issues with wanting to stream at the same time while in Shark Space. Like that mode will force close apps when you change from StreamElements to your game of choice. Easy enough. Just switch off Shark Space and you're good to go, right? Nope! All the key mapping disappears and your controller works like a standard Bluetooth controller.

New hurdle... New approach...

A few years ago I started designing a cell phone mount that worked with the good old GameStick controller. Not a terrible Bluetooth controller to work with and it definitely has its merits. It has plenty of buttons to work with and the only real thing missing are the L and R Analog triggers. With most of the mobile games that I play (currently Shadowgun Legends, Pubg Mobile and lots of retro console emulation...) I am am in pretty good shape foregoing the automatically applied benefits of Sharkspace, doing it manually, and using a stock Bluetooth controller profile.

Not bad.

So the next issue: Dealing with some of the nuances of Twitch that is handled by logging into the site and bots.

This is when I bought a Nook 7 and installed every known app to man for traveling for work… To entertain me while on a plane or in a hotel room. So that included Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Gogo Inflight, and (of course) Twitch. With the app running on a different/larger device, I could monitor chat and run the bot from one screen and focus on being on camera or playing my game directly on my phone mounted to the Gamestick controller. My final hurdle is to fake having scenes like in OBS but from my mobile device. I figured it out by using Google Slides but the audio feed only works with only the app you are running in regardless of multitasking. So playing music on Google Play Music or VLC while swapped to my Google Slides “scenes” only played music while on but went to dead silence while swapping back to my BRB screen. This won’t do! I took to the YouTube embed that’s built into Slides and placed a teeeeeny tiny YouTube video in the corner to enable on each slide. Kludgy? Yes! Perfect replacement? Not so much. Totally functional? ABSOLUTELY!

Next experiment, using a laptop running PrimeOS to run the show! (Which is what I’m typing this post up on, now!)

Stay tuned!