Hello, there! Nowadays everyone streams a game, but just a few know how to make a good impression while streaming. Today, I'll provide you with a couple of hints in order to improve your stream. I will not make a review of how to set your screen resolution or how to setup your bitrate as there is a lot of guides teaching you how to do that. Instead, I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that enables the making of good transitions and other kinds of cool stuff.

I'm assuming that you use xsplit to stream, there are others programs that you can use to stream but the majority of the community has at least tried xsplit once, so I'll stick with it.

Tip #1: Use hotkeys to switch between scenes

When you stream you may not have more than one scene set to make a transition to another, so your standard overlay will be displayed over the game screen. This isn't bad, but take a second to think about it: you could make your stream look much more professional with a simple hotkey.

If you have the premium version of xsplit you will be able to use the whole 12 scenes, in the free version you can only use 4 of it.

Set up some crazy hotkeys for changing scenes, I particularly use Shift+Ctrl+D, E, R and F for the 4 scenes. Once it's done you'll have some options. Memorize them, write them down in post-its and attach those to your display, use auto-hotkey to bind your hotkeys to some keys you don't use or if you have a customizable keyboard with macro buttons, why not making a more fancy setup?

Once the hotkeys are set, you can use an auxiliary program to switch between scenes like this or you can remind yourself of changing the scenes after every game or in every transition such is required. After all that fuss a new question comes out: why would you use 2 scenes? Check the answer in tip #2

Tip #2: Customize your stream

When we are watching championships, show matches or regular streams made by pro-players there's a lot of customized work, the overlays, the waiting screen and the stream background plus bio. A lot of fine work. Teams have their own source of designs, and so do the players and big names in StarCraft 2 scenario. Seeing all that cool stuff you may ask your regular player self why can't you have that as well? Truth is, much of custom work can be found in reddit, like the work of this guy.

Tip #3: (Twitch only) Stream the right game!

A small trick that may help you getting some or more viewers is updating the game you are streaming. When you start streaming, open a tab and go to your Twitch dashboard and type the game name at the side of "playing". Twitch has an extensive library of games.