Twitchat Origin story

Twitchat is originally a little personal project that got kinda out of control.
Here is its origin story for the curious ones.

Back when I was streaming, I had a secret enigma on my stream that users could try to solve.
The entry point was a user posting cryptic messages like this one once every hour or so:

C⌠ɭ╤╖┬├╡zⱶ¯▬¯ⱶ∟─╒═╔⌠ⱶꟷ∟|‗ꞁ╟╟│‒ ‖╗╗0╩╫╞┐╘ⱶ╕╞n▬╫Ɩ]╡‖ ‗╨╤ꞁ╡‖¦╣╞╜ſ╙!┌∟┬╛╟¯]2╤≡⌡═╠╠⌡–╖∏╣‗╥¯rd.╖╨┬┐┬U╓╧―╛╝╛╖╧╔╨┤ꟷ₸

Once a user understood these cryptic messages, they were redirected to a Discord bot.
That bot had more riddles to solve, some of them showing interactive devices on my stream that they had to manipulate thanks to the Heat plugin.

There were multiple levels of successes (one got never solved) and when solving all the main riddles, the user was given a secret key and was invited to install this browser script.
(The actual FR page the user was sent to)

This key and script allowed them to write cryptic messages on chat, like the one above, that only I and other riddles solver could read and write.

What does this have to do with Twitchat?

The issue with this extension is that it only works on Twitch from a browser.
It cannot be installed on OBS.
But I wanted to read chat from an OBS dock.

One day, the 11th of January 2022 at 3am, I got a rush of motivation and decided to create a very simple Twitch chat that could read / write such messages and that I could use within an OBS dock.
14h later, at 5pm, I shared this with a few streamer friends:

This is what the very first version of Twitchat looked like.
Twitchat has a little more options today... 😬
And now that I look at it I better understand why my friends basically answered "WTF ?! You've done all that TODAY ??!" :')

So I can read and write cryptic messages from Twitchat 😲?

Absolutely!
That probably won't be of any use to you but you can use the command "/cypherkey xxxx" to initialize it.
A padlock icon will appear on the footer. Click it to switch to "cypher" mode to write ciphered messages. If your viewers install the browser extension and use the same cypher key their ciphered messages will appear clearly for you :)
Use "/cypherreset" to disable that feature once bored by it.


You now know when and why I put my first foot on the rabbit hole!
Since then I'm free falling inside that hole until I hit the ground 😅. Not sure a ground actually exists given how the list of ideas only keeps growing...

Hope you liked that Twitchat story :)