What Happens When There Is No Game to Show?

What do we show when there is no game?

As CRESA becomes more aware of the state of game capture, another question appears. What should the stream actually show when there is no game running at all? Leaving an empty capture source on screen was never going to fit the direction of CRESA, so development begins on a dedicated No Game Active browser scene.

The idea is simple: an inactive game should be a recognised broadcast state, not an empty space waiting for something to happen.

Turning idle time into presentation

The first version takes the form of a small pixel-inspired runner scene. Instead of displaying a blank game area, CRESA can begin presenting something deliberately designed for the period between games or while no supported game is active. More importantly, the scene is driven by CRESA's idle game state.

This means the presentation is not simply another overlay that has to be manually switched on. It begins reacting to what CRESA understands about the current broadcast.

A small character enters the picture

At this stage the runner is still part of the wider No Game Active experiment. That is about to change. Development on the scene creates an opportunity to give CRESA something with a little more personality than a generic idle animation. The next step would introduce a dedicated sprite mascot into the runner and begin turning the simple No Game Active concept into something much more recognisable.

More than an empty screen

The No Game Active scene establishes another part of CRESA's presentation philosophy. Different broadcast conditions should have intentional responses. Capture working, capture recovering and no game being active are three different situations, so they should not all result in the same blank or broken-looking output.

Even when there is nothing to capture, CRESA should still have something to show.