Welcome to Live Aware, an online collaborative platform that enables digital development teams to effortlessly capture, analyze, and share player experiences at all stages of development. With Live Aware, teams take advantage of a full set of collaborative features to drive playtesting, build reviews, QA, content reviews, and other forms of feedback, research, and validation. This guide provides a high level overview of each Live Aware feature to get you started quickly and easily.
Log into Live Aware
Access Live Aware at liveaware.io; then click Login, located in the top right corner. If you are the first team member to access Live Aware, a Live Aware team member has created your account, and your login will be authorized via a Google Account identity.
When you log in to Live Aware, you will arrive at the Event Dashboard. Events are logical containers used to organize your captured videos for analysis. An Event can represent an organized playtest, a milestone build, an internal tournament, or whatever makes sense for you and your team.
On first login you will see an Event we’ve created for you named “Live Aware Welcome Event”. Click the Event card and watch the video “Welcome to Live Aware” for a quick visual tour of features.
You can create as many new Events as you need by clicking the New Event card. While in the Event Dashboard view, you will see all of your Events. Hover over an Event to reveal a three-dot icon at the top-right of the event. From this menu you can edit Event details, copy a link to the Event for sharing, star the event for easy filtering, archive and delete the event.
💡These three-dot icons are used throughout Live Aware to perform operations on objects like Events and videos.
Select an Event card, to review any videos organized in that Event. There are two types of videos you will see in your Event: Streams and Uploads. Streams are live video feeds created by the Live Aware Desktop Recorder that can be viewed and annotated in real-time. Uploads are videos that were uploaded directly to Live Aware from a device either through the Live Aware portal, or automatically uploaded by the Desktop Recorder after play is complete. Both give you the flexibility to analyze and collaborate in real-time, annotating key moments, reviewing transcripts and automatically generated insights, live or previously recorded.
Create your First Event
While in the Dashboard view, click the New Event card.
Provide a Title and Description of your Event, and select a color to represent it.
Click Create.
Your newly created event will now show on the dashboard.
💡More detailed information on Events can be found in the article Event Management
Download and Install the Live Aware Desktop Recorder
The Live Aware Desktop Recorder is a standalone app to make capturing video, as Streams or Uploads, as simple as possible. You can download it, on the Live Aware Desktop Recorder download page.
Once downloaded, launch the application and follow the on-screen prompts to complete the installation. Following installation, open the Live Aware Desktop Recorder, and log in using the same credentials as you did in the Live Aware online portal.
Once logged in you will see a list of Events. From the Desktop Recorder you can also create and manage Events.
Capture your First Play Experience
Select the Event you would like to Stream. In the Events list on the left you can select an Event you previously created or “Live Aware Welcome Event”.
Set the name of your stream. This is pre-populated in a field above your streaming settings, but you can change it to be more descriptive by clicking on the pencil icon.
Select the screen you want to capture. From the dropdown with the screen icon. You can choose to stream your entire screen or a specific application. If you are running the game in fullscreen, you will need to select Entire Screen; if you are running it in windowed mode, you can select the game from the dropdown.
Select the audio source. From the dropdown with the speaker icon you can choose to stream your whole system audio, or the audio from a specific application.
Select a source for your camera and microphone. From the dropdown menus with corresponding icons select which camera and mic to use. .
Click Go Live
When your stream is complete, click End Stream
Analyze your First Video
While videos are valuable on their own, the real power comes from our collaborative analysis tools which enable teams to efficiently extract deep insights from any play experience. Teams can create Annotations, generate Transcripts, and take action on Insights dynamically created. We’ll take a closer look at all three.
Annotations are time stamped comments made by any member of your Team. You can start a thread with a reply, click a timestamp to go to that moment in a video, and send a comment straight to Jira (more integrations coming soon!). Annotations are a great place for everyone on the team to give commentary on video content.
💡For more information on Annotations, see the help article Make an Annotation.
Transcripts provide a time stamped text version of the verbal audio captured in your videos. These transcripts are searchable and used to quickly find key moments in your videos. From a transcript, you can create Annotations or Slices by highlighting a portion of the transcript, you can create Annotations or Slices.
Slices are an advanced version of a clipped segment of your video. Currently they contain the video clip and transcript. In the near future, Slices will contain other important data to understand the game state, including event logs, device diagnostics, and input data. Once created, you can share a link to the Slice or download it to save it locally.
💡For more information on Slices, see the help article Making Slices While Watching Livestreams and VoDs
Insights provide a comprehensive summary report of patterns that have emerged from your video content. This is one of the most powerful advantages of structuring your video content and associated transcripts: the ability to immediately generate actionable insights for your team. While Insights currently generate a report, with linkable quotes to key moments in videos, in the near future Live Aware will provide a collaborative workflow for teammates to review, organize and take action on generated insights.
Add more Team Members
The real power of Live Aware comes when inviting your entire team to collaboratively analyze and take action on the video content that’s been created.
In the Live Aware web portal, hover over your profile picture at the top right of the screen, and select Settings.
From the Members view, click Add New Member.
Enter a First name, Last name, and Email address and click Send invite.Your teammate will now receive an invitation email. They will have a Member role to start, but from this view you can change them to an Admin or Viewer as necessary.
💡More information about roles and permissions for your team can be found in the help article Member Management
We hope you’ve found this guided journey helpful. As you continue to learn and use Live Aware, please consider these next steps:
Get help anytime at support.liveaware.io.
Provide feedback using the ? icon at the bottom right portion of the screen in Live Aware.
Join our Discord server and connect with our community.