by MIOM|prog

Background

Often, things in the community that are happening are flashes in the pan.  They need to be highlighted because they are shaping the future in various ways, and often can use some assistance from the community.  Recently, the MIOM team had an episode of the podcast dedicated to highlighting great things going on in the community, and I really wanted to push along that line of thought.  Pushing Forward will be part of the “prog blog” highlighting amazing things that people in the Smash scene are doing to help push the scene along, regardless of title. 

We’ve seen videos change over the years.  From being recorded on camcorders and VHS all the way to simultaneously uploading on YouTube while streaming the next match on Twitch.  There are a pair of sites that are aiming at revolutionizing how we get these matches now.  So, we’ve got Zaandaa from ComboStar.tv and Urz from vods.co to talk about themselves, their projects and more.

Prog: First off, who are you all?

Zaandaa:  I’m Adam and go by Zaandaa, creator of ComboStar.tv.  I was introduced to Melee in 2010 at my college Smash Club.  Before then I had only played casually and preferred 64.  What drove me to play Melee was seeing what was possible in the game, and that’s thanks to combo videos like I Killed Mufasa and Too Manly for Brawl.  I played because I wanted to do cool stuff like that, and I eventually made my own combo video, ZAANDAAAAAAAA, named after how a few people cheered for me.

I always put effort into my interests, so I usually end up volunteering.  Outside of Smash, I’m interested in game development and other software/web creation, and I’ve actually done a lot more in those communities.  So in Smash, because I could rarely go to tournaments, I ran my own series in upstate NY for a few years.  Now I’m in a part of Maine that is 1-2 hours away from other players, but I still do my best to contribute by programming.

Urz: My name is Urz and I’m the creator of Vods.Co.

As a kid, I was totally in Nintendo’s camp.  Super Smash Bros. was announced, and that year my father asked me if I wanted an N64 or a Dreamcast for my birthday.  I chose the one where Pikachu got to fight Samus.

By the time Melee came out a few years later, I was beyond excited for a sequel.  A friend of mine ended up getting a Gamecube for Christmas and I basically lived there playing Smash into the early hours of the morning.  I fell out of it for a few years after that, eventually getting back in with Brawl and a new group of friends.

A long-time friend of mine is part of the same local community as Armada, so I had heard about the player second-hand for a while.  He told me there was a big tournament coming up and Armada would be attending: Apex 2010.  Having somehow avoided the competitive side of the game up until that point, I figured it would be fun to watch and root on his buddy.  It was a blast, and I learned a lot about the community that weekend.  This tournament was also the formation of the Armada/Hungrybox rivalry.  That storyline was the base of my excitement leading to the next US national, Pound V, taking place six months later (and where Armada claims revenge with Young Link). Eventually I found myself watching near every major.

We’ve been seeing recently a lot of crossover with the Smash series and interest in other competitive gaming spheres.  How about you, any experience in non-Smash titles?

Zaandaa: Although we’ve had other fighting games at my tournaments, Smash is the only game scene in which I’ve been active.  I enjoy fast 2D platformers like Dustforce and Super Meat Boy, and I do pretty well on those leaderboards.  I get caught up optimizing routes and trying new strategies, and dying countless times won’t deter me.  In Smash that translates to some reckless fun, and it helps me figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Urz: I’ve long been involved with trading card games, competing at Yu-Gi-Oh in the first season of the SJC series, eventually moving on to Magic which I still follow. DreamHack Summer 2011 got me into StarCraft 2 for a couple years.  I’ll tune in to other fighting game majors, and some locals like NLBC and The Runback (Marvel is my favorite).  Hearthstone is rad, and the competitive infrastructure being built around that game is impressive.

For about a year I organized and broadcasted online tournaments for “Guns of Icarus Online”, a crew-based airship combat game.  If that sounds like your jam, I definitely recommend checking it out.  It has a small but very dedicated competitive community.  The video archive of my broadcasts can be found here.

So, let’s get to the meat.  Before I got into commentating, I was an uploader, not even a streamer.  I would go to an event with Chain-Ace, and we’d both have videos from the same event on our separate channels.  They might be out of order, I might have winners finals, he’d have grand finals, so on and so forth.  So later, we started MeleeAtlNorth to be one stop searching for not just our videos, but for anyone who wanted to participate in the region and have their scenes highlighted.

That being said, if you guys were around back then, things would probably have been easier for everyone.  Fortunately, you’re around now and making things easier.  Tell us about your projects.

Zaandaa: ComboStar.tv Follow your favorite players and games with videos and info all in one place!  A few big features come together to make this possible.

The database stores videos across all Smash games and several fighting games, each with data like type, event, players, and characters.  You can make searches such as Genesis 1 matches, Captain Falcon combo videos, 3DS Bowser vs Bowser, Mew2King Marth vs Falco, and PewPewU + SFAT team matches.  Everything has its own page, and lists and links are all over the site.  Pages feature recent videos, recent events, top players, player Twitter feeds, and Twitch links.

More important is how this resource is used for everyone, like following players, promoting content creators, and finding new content.  If you’re a Mango fan, click the Fan button on his page to subscribe to his videos for your personal video feed.  Fan buttons also help rank site content, useful for finding out what videos to watch or Marth players to follow.

There are tons of videos and players out there, and this wouldn’t be possible without crowdsourcing.  Anyone with an account can add a video link!  We’re still new, so we need some dedicated users from each game to help add content.

Urz:  vods.co/ aims to be a comprehensive video archive of competitive gaming matches.  Match video uploads have always been very decentralized. Everyone has their own YouTube channel: broadcasters, TOs, players recording off-stream matches. Videos from a single event end up spread across many different places. Tagging and metadata can be questionable or non-existent. vods.co brings it all together in one place, in a searchable archive that helps you find what you’re looking for.

In addition to building the software which hosts this information, I’ve also been tagging thousands of matches since launch. As a result, it’s now trivial to find videos by a large number of criteria: matchups between players, characters, everything from an event, as much of your favorite casters as you can handle, to give some examples.
As someone who is a hardcore spectator, one my focuses has been providing a great viewing experience. The video pages have a large, responsive player which scales to screens of all sizes, with minimal distractions. A particular feature I think is really cool is the spoiler-free event viewer, which generates a list of every match from an event sorted by round, with the player and caster names hidden.

Both of these projects are awesome, I remember seeing the initial post about ComboStar on reddit and really liking the idea of subscribing to my favorite players.  And Urz, I’ve seen the project since the early moments and it’s also phenomenal, much better than the days of being on the DC++ hub and hoping people had their matches in folders separated by characters.  What made you decide to get into this?

Zaandaa: One big factor is that YouTube and Twitch don’t make it easy enough to find specific content.  On YouTube, you could find part 2 but not 1, or you might find cooking videos.  Many Twitch highlights aren’t uploaded to YouTube.  Give a database a little flexibility, and you can organize it all into one easy-to-search site.  With this database, I put emphasis on content discovery.  It’s easy for experienced players to find what they want, and it’s much easier for anyone to get started and find more.

ComboStar.TV is a project for and about the community.  Crowdsourcing makes sense for finding videos and keeping the database up to date.  The resource is useful for anyone, and some services can be used to help enable content creators to make a living.

Against my intentions, I made the site alone.  I made a prototype last fall and posted on r/smashbros asking for help, but none of the few interested developers stuck around.  I finally put in some hard work these last few months and launched late July.  I’m very open to working with anyone interested in helping.  So much code is already done, but getting people to help add videos has been a challenge.

Urz: While I was hosting Guns of Icarus tournaments, I built a small website to archive the matches I had broadcast. It was simple: reverse chronological order, with filtering by team or event. After it was completed, I looked at it and thought to myself, “why don’t all competitive games have a site like this?” That was essentially the prototype. vods.co launched on July 10th, the day before Evo. The flood of traffic immediately overwhelmed the site (thanks prog), but after an emergency migration to a more powerful server, it’s been humming along since. I run vods.co by myself.

That’s what is going on in the present with your projects. What do you want to do in the future?

Zaandaa: It’s easy to come up with and implement more ideas, and I have special long-term plans for being able to give more back to the community.  An important goal in my plans is to let others make money through the site’s services. ComboStar relies on videos, and more people are taking uploading seriously, so it makes sense to support uploaders who want to make a living.

The full details aren’t yet announced, and I want to get in touch with uploaders to finalize and work out some of those details, but here’s the general plan: one way is through the planned site monthly subscription in which you can allocate most of your dollars spent to uploaders, and we’ll have tiers for different levels of how much you want to support people each month.  You can also skip the premium subscription and donate.  My goal is to be transparent about this process, so you can count on more details later.

This service is in addition to other ways to support uploaders, like subscribing on Twitch.  ComboStar.TV lets people find content, and it’s easy to include Twitch links to follow and subscribe.  I’d like to use a similar system to support events and players.

As for new features, there’s some cool stuff on the way with connecting players and accounts, and I’ve partially completed gif support that will showcase the “combo” part of the site name.  These will work like videos, so you’ll soon be able to search to see “Mew2King Marth on Fox” combos one after another.  If you see a gif you like, save the link to add it to ComboStar later.  These are much harder to find than tournament videos on YouTube, so we’ll really need help getting them together!

Urz:  vods.co will be expanding into more games soon. When I say “a comprehensive video archive of competitive gaming matches”, I’m not just talking about Smash. Let me know what games you are excited for!

In general though, I’m the kind of person who “wings it”. Most of the features are just ideas that popped into my head as I go about my day, or have been suggested on sites such as reddit or Twitter. If something sounds cool, it will often end up on the to-do list. There is a site blog where I post about new features as they are added.

Awesome, that’s all really cool stuff.  I’ve been hoping for Smash to get a site like Frame Advantage, and you two are taking that concept and running with it.  Where can we learn more?

Zaandaa: Everyone should check out the site first and foremost!  We need volunteers to help find the many videos out there regardless of what game you play.  Once I figure out Twitter, you can see some tweets from @ComboStarTV where I’ll be tweeting some highlights of adding videos and other site things. If you want to get in touch with me directly, whether you’re an uploader, developer or anybody, my email is adam@ComboStar.tv.

Urz: @Urzo is where to hit me up, and I’m always interested in reading feedback or suggestions for the site. You can also find my email address on vods.co‘s “about” page.

Well, before we wrap it up, you guys are doing great things, and again, thanks.  What do you want to see in the future though from someone out there?  A lot of people want to contribute, any ideas or even advice?

Zaandaa: I think there’s a lot of room for cool new resources for the community, and we’ve recently been seeing several new sites pop up.  I’d like to see a good place for developers and general volunteers to talk about new projects or ideas and work together.  It doesn’t have to be just programming or websites; people could also want support with event planning or other community projects.

One other thing I’ve noticed while going through old videos is that sometimes the videos no longer exist.  There are a few re-uploaded versions I’ve found, but it’s entirely possible we could lose a lot of videos someday.  We’re also waking up to this with the recent news of Twitch removing old vods. I don’t know if there’s an easy backup solution to this, but we do rely a lot on YouTube.

Urz: Follow your passion! Competitive gaming as a spectator sport is incredibly cool, and that’s what motivated me to build the site and to continue working on it. If you want to build something cool, you need to find something that you’re passionate about. The rest becomes details at that point.

Thanks again guys, follow their twitters, check out and bookmark the sites, and help out if you can!