Scenes that do the work for you

Most people build scenes per game, discover after four games that they are maintaining twelve near-identical layouts, and then stop changing anything because changing anything means changing it twelve times.

Build four scenes instead, once, and make the game the only thing that swaps.

The four scenes

• Starting. What people see before you begin. A still frame, a line of text saying what tonight is, your music. It exists so that arriving early feels deliberate rather than broken.
• Main. The game, your camera, and the minimum overlay. This is ninety per cent of your stream.
• Talking. Camera large, game small or absent. For the start, the end, and any moment where the conversation is the content.
• Away. For breaks. A still frame with "back in ten" and no live microphone.

That is a whole stream. Everything else is a variation of one of these.

Make the game a source you swap, not a scene you copy

The mistake is putting the game capture inside each scene separately. When you change game, you then have to fix every scene, and the scenes drift apart.

Instead, build the game capture once and reuse the same source everywhere. In OBS this is a scene as a source: make a scene called "Game" holding just the capture, then add that scene inside Main and Talking. Change it in one place, and both update.

Do the same for your camera and for your alerts. You end up with three shared building blocks and four scenes that arrange them differently — which is why adding a fifth scene later takes two minutes instead of an evening.

Lay out Main for the smallest screen

Your layout should be designed for someone watching on a phone with the chat panel open, because that is a very large share of your audience.

That means:

• Nothing important in the corners you have covered with overlay furniture.
• Text at least as large as the game's own UI. If you have to lean in to read it on your monitor, it is invisible on a phone.
• The camera out of the way of the part of the screen the game uses for information. Minimaps, health bars and objective text are where viewers look to understand what is happening.

Check it by shrinking the preview window until it is roughly phone-sized. What survives is your real layout.

The Talking scene earns its keep

Most streamers build this and never use it. Use it. Switch to it when you are explaining something, when you are reading chat properly, when something has just happened and you want to talk about it.

The reason is simple: a large face reads as a conversation, and a small face in the corner of a game reads as background. Streams that feel personal tend to be the ones that are not afraid to leave the game for ninety seconds.

Two mistakes worth avoiding

Transitions that take a second. A stinger animation is fun three times and then it is a second of your life, forty times a stream. Use a short fade for everything and keep the animated one for the start of the stream.

A starting screen that outstays its welcome. Ten minutes of countdown is ten minutes for a new arrival to leave. If you must have a pre-stream window, talk over it. The point of the scene is not to fill time, it is to signal that the stream is about to happen.

Hotkeys, once

Assign a key to each of the four scenes and to mute. Not a stream deck — keys on your keyboard will do, as long as they are keys you will not hit by accident mid-game.

The reason is the break. If switching to Away requires finding the window and clicking, you will not do it, and viewers will watch an empty chair with a live microphone while you make tea.

When to change it

Not often. A layout you keep changing is a layout your regulars have to keep relearning, and it eats the time you could spend on the stream itself.

Change it when something specific is wrong: a viewer says they cannot read something, the game you are now playing puts its information somewhere your overlay covers, or you have added something that genuinely needs a home.

Otherwise, leave it. A slightly imperfect layout you never touch is worth more than a perfect one you rebuild every month.

Next: bitrate, encoders, and why the stream looks soft when the picture is moving.