There are very good reasons we're moving away from this approach, but I'm still quite proud we managed to pull off these morphs mostly seamlessly.
This was a test I built for when we redid the layout and morphing logic for AGDQ 2023, and this isn't even showing the method we ended up going with!
You are most welcome!
Here's Dillon explaining how the PVW/PGM system used to work before we changed it for this event:
bsky.app/profile/hate...
It wasn't *different*, per se, it was just a larger headache to ensure you were in the right state, and would be harder to have a complete picture rather than infer what the full comp would be once you threw to it
As always, thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone on GDQ's production team that makes this work worthwhile. Being in the stream room watching all of this come together is like seeing an impossible magic trick, and it never gets old.
Other than a few other bits and bobs (interview scorebugs! More Rive data binding in the omnibar! Bug fixing!), that's the main stuff worth discussing. I'm happy to answer any questions, but I think that have just been the longest iteration of the broadcast megathread yet!
And then I got sick! I'm not as happy as I wanted to be with the final product of the motion graphics themselves because of my condition, but based on the live audience reaction, we got the desired response. I'll take it.
(Link goes to post-credits scene)
youtu.be/mxV-3XJy2WI?...
I came up with a concept, wrote a script, got Trey Dexter (who filmed/edited the finale) and @adef.bsky.social on board, got approval for the concept, and then we filmed the segment fairly early in the week, with the intent that I would do all the motion graphics once I flew home on Wednesday.
Final big story: Since I'd done the animation to close out SGDQ 2025, I was asked if I'd be up for doing something similar this time as well, because we wanted to reveal AGDQ's move to Atlanta for 2027. And in typical fashion, I turned it into a sizeable project almost immediately.
An animation of flying through a time wormhole. Text: AAAAAAND... TIME!
And then the final closing animation was mostly thanks to the help of @vaporgabe.com who was kind enough to share some MoGRTs he'd already made for another project and I had an easy time modifying.
And then I made a dynamic graphic controlled by the interview crew for the time machine. (Built in @rive.app and within a single day, too)
...screenshot chosen purely for the Brutal Melo drip
An animated shot of a futuristic skyline with a neon "GDQ" sign in the foreground. Titles say "THE YEAR: 3026"
The final 'feature' I can talk about isn't so much about Pratchett itself, but I ended up getting to work a lot more with the interview team this go-round and help with the pre-show!
First, we repurposed the animation I did for the close of SGDQ2025 as a fun callback to open the show...
Screenshot of the Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer run at AGDQ 2026
We also made a new randomizer tracker for Donkey Kong 64, colorized to match the runner's shirts. This one was built by @mesosupe.bsky.social, who has more less become "the randomizer/bingo guy" on our dev team. 😂
Sadly the hotel's network crapped out mid-run, causing Pratchett to be unable to display runner L3's for a few minutes. Two runners didn't get their names shown, which was aggravating.
Also, I think if we do something like this in the future, we'll probably choose to keep names up a tad longer.
A screenshot from the Super Mario 64 70 Star Relay at AGDQ 2026. The runner 'Tomomodachi' has their name in a lower third over the gameplay
For the Super Mario 64 70 Star/70 Runner relay, @hatetosayit.com built a custom lower third grpahic so that we could have every runner's name on screen without constantly just changing the 'runner nameplate', which would have been hard to notice.
Huge credit to @kirbycatcher.bsky.social, @starrodkirby86.bsky.social, and their entire crew for their collaboration/input.
Also to Jon Egeland, who is GDQ's Head of Event Production. Just about every boost in production value you've seen (camera, lighting, etc.) is his doing!
There was an early version of this where the concept was more or less the same, but the size ratios were way off. And within 20 minutes of talking through it and some simple tweaks, it was a vastly superior viewing experience.
I mentioned this in the reddit AMA, but having an active dialogue with the runners was vital to getting this right. What's a good camera angle? How important is a clean game feed? What scale can we have it at? What info is the scoring element conveying?
From a tech standpoint, it's not complex: We're receiving a game feed, splitting it into two pieces, and then applying masks using png's to each. I then made a decorative background to help marry it back together.
This is also evidence that good cinematography is HUGE for runs like these.
A screenshot of the Maimai DX Prism Plus run from AGDQ 2026
Okay, let's talk about the Maimai DX run, because this was definitely the thing I heard about the most from people. You really liked this presentation and layout!
I think we're going to talk about whether both should be manually controlled (or tweak data polling to make its timing more granular), but overall I'm pretty happy with its addition to our presentation.
We had one animation that would display automatically when a bid war was closed on a donation tracker, and then a second to reveal the winner of the bid war that could be triggered by the host in order to give it a big reveal.
A graphic that looks like a pixellated metal door with red lights. The text in front says "BIDS CLOSED"
Moving onto new things! Probably my favorite new addition were the animations added to the omnibar for bid war announcements.
That's only going to be the first of multiple big changes, because as you might guess, the 3D panels are going to need to go as well. What does that mean? We haven't decided yet, but we're not getting the payoff that was hoped for. And sometimes that's just how it goes.
So for #AGDQ2026, we undid a lot of that, returning to a traditional OBS scene list, with every layout getting its own scene. There's still plenty of fun nesting tricks and dynamic source management, especially with the game/camera feeds, but it's one less source of anxiety for tech crew.
Our setup was making it much harder to work on things in Preview, which was a pain for stream techs and producers. It could also sometimes be hard to understand just what state OBS and Pratchett were in, what state they _thought_ they were in, and whether those things agreed. That's not tenable!
And sadly, a lot of the concepts we had in mind for how to capitalize on this just never got to where I had hoped.
The transitions are neat. I'm proud of them. But are they worth this huge technical hurdle? No.
(example at start of vid)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cirr...
Pratchett is built in NodeCG, which uses obs-websocket to talk with OBS, receive information about its current state, and control it remotely. This dance can be extremely nuanced and intricate, and we now have a setup where we are relying on it to do far more (and in a way that can break badly).
But it didn't just stop there, it also affected our signal flow in OBS! This wasn't the dynamic stinger cheat we'd done in the previous iteration of layouts - this was setting up OBS to be showing the same single scene constantly, with everything else happening within nested elements.
This decision created a cascading effect that has a major influence on just about every other technical aspect of Pratchett. How components could be made, how they were rendered, what behavior/animation they were capable of, what would be performant enough to use, etc. etc.
