If you were one of the tens of thousands of people playing a simultaneous game of Pokémon back in February, a Kickstarter project could soon let you run your own crowd-controlled game via broadcasting service Twitch.
Choice Chamber is a crowdsourced game in which online viewers can influence the players' fate during live play as they navigate through a randomly-generated series of puzzle rooms. Viewers on game streaming site Twitch respond to polls in a chat box, which can do anything from trigger new enemies to add power-ups.
This concept will be familiar to anyone who followed the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon in February, when thousands of players simultaneously guided one character all the way through a game of Pokémon Red. The game took 16 days to complete as players sent every possible button command through Twitch's chat box. While it was sometimes an exercise in frustration, a combined 1.16 million players ultimately completed the goal, according to Twitch's stats.
Choice Chamber builds on that idea, though it was in development before the launch of Twitch Plays Pokémon. The game was designed from the ground up to integrate broadcasting into the gameplay, where viewers make many of the decisions that the game's AI normally would. (There is an "offline" mode for solitary play, in which those decisions are made by the game.)
The game's team is seeking $30,000 in funding to finish development, and Twitch has stepped in during the final four days to help make that happen. The website, which is the largest platform for game livestreaming with 45 million unique viewers a month, offered to match any Kickstarter donations made before the project wraps on April 20.
If funded, game creators Studio Bean said the project should be completed by Dec. 2014. At time of writing, the project needed about $12,000 to reach its goal.