Meet The Streamer Drawing His Way to Victory

One of the things that has been amazing to see in the last decade of gaming is the advances in accessibility. From the regular availability of options that cater to disabled players, to the Xbox adaptive controller and even modular difficulty settings, it’s been a welcome change to an industry that regularly puts up barriers for so many players. 

Steel Battlion’s control is simple. Just hit the “Move-Forward-Button” to move forward, duh!

In a similar vein, players have innovated by using various different methods to control the games they love. Some players beat Dark Souls with anything that can plug into a USB-port, other players of games like space sim Elite: Dangerous have taken to using the classic Steel Battalion controller, with the set-up having more buttons than an elevator in The Shard. However, one of the most interesting cases of unorthodox controls comes from Twitch streamer Star Rain. 

Whilst Luke Howard “loves pretty much everything”, the small streamer is currently playing popular first-person shooters, whether it be Apex Legends or Valorant. However, he’s not doing this with a traditional keyboard and mouse set-up, but instead with a stylus.

A very literal case of the pen being mightier than the sword. Or more aptly, the mouse. 

Howard certainly has developed an enticing playstyle, evident by the 24.1k upvotes (at the time of writing) on a Reddit post showing off his penmanship on r/apexlegends. This has even helped his viewership on his still-young Twitch and Youtube channels as he explained. 

“I'm hitting a month on Youtube, that's when I started putting out content… I've been loving it, it was crazy after that Reddit post, I'd done a few [videos] before and some people had been like 'Oh that's cool' but that one kind of exploded and that night I got Twitch Affiliate in one day, so I went from one watcher to now, I can make money on Twitch.”

An impressive feat to be sure and proof of the viability and public interest in such unique play. This all started with a random Twitch video of Respawn’s seminal shoot-em-up Apex Legends and his graphics tablet. When it comes to the inspiration for the video,  Howard says “I honestly can't recall who it was or what necessarily the source [for the idea of the video] was, I think it was from a twitch stream and I think the person doing it was just doing it as like some goofy one-off challenge you know. But, the clip was them hitting a Kraber shot, [when] they were using a pen. There was something about that I thought 'Oh wow, that's really really cool, that's really neat'.”

A-PEN LEGEND!

(get it because the game is Ape- ahhh forget it)

Howard remembers that he had been “using my graphics tablet to draw, at the time I was drawing a lot...  I wasn't doing anything crazy, just doing some little sketches in photoshop or whatever.” He originally had a pen for drawing from his Wacom, a company that sells various specialised tablets and other devices for use with a stylus. However, once he put some time in playing with a stylus, he invested in an XP Deco 01 V2 tablet and pen. “They're essentially the same quality but cheaper”, but ultimately, the choice benefited his play. “[XP Deco 01 was] the just the one I happened to see that... didn't have any extra features. I didn't need anything extra.” 

First-person shooters are heavily mouse-dependent. Whether it be quickly flicking to a target with a sniper character (consider Widowmaker in Overwatch), or making small precision movements in the middle of a hectic firefight, the mouse is a key component of play in any FPS. 

Though for Howard, it wasn’t as much of a challenge as you might imagine, just a case of getting used to the pen, a process that took a while as he explains. “Immediately it was very disorienting and very nauseating. The hard part for me, I'd say… [was] initially I didn't have the keyboard that I have now. I have a custom keyboard now and it's kind of become a critical part of the setup because I've actually programmed it myself to have a right-click key”. Doing this prevented him from losing any of the functions controlled via a right-click on a mouse (e.g. aiming down sights in Apex Legends). 

I feel it’s also worth mentioning that somehow Howard finds using a split keyboard more helpful.

This made the first three or so months a struggle. For some games like Rainbow Six: Siege, there was even more of a problem where the extra buttons on a gaming mouse come in handy. “For Siege, that was kind of like an overload because I'd been used to using an MMO mouse with twelve buttons on the side and so I'd have all my gadgets on there and [so] switching to a pen that, while it has buttons, they are so uneconomical to use. I basically just had to forget they existed. I actually disabled them. So having to switch to [primarily] keyboard [controls], playing Siege and Apex, was a mess, it was like I had stepped down massively from where I was.”

The other issue to overcome in controlling any FPS was more of a spatial problem. Consider a keyboard and mouse setup, you don’t really have to consider how much space you have for your mouse as the pad is there and has more than enough space to account for any aggressive or wide moves. But Howard describes how there is a problem to consider with your range of movement when you are using a pen. “With your mouse, it's simply determined by your mouse pad and you'll see pro-players with 2ftx2ft mousepads, and even 4ftx4ft mousepads. And you can set your sensitivity based on that. With the pens, you're limited to what the manufacturer has set for you. It has a set area where it will register input from the stylus. So in this case, mine is about 10x6 inches and that's what I've got to work with.”

But now, after a year of honing his skills, Star Rain finds himself streaming on Twitch amongst other things. “I've been loving it. It was crazy after that Reddit post… I think once I gain an [larger] audience, I would like to also do some other stuff not involving the pen if it turns out my personality is sustainable on Twitch, if people like watching me.” He points to examples such as Halo, Hyper Scape and other similar FPSs as well as hopefully some indie titles in the future.

All this has contributed to showing the versatility of modern gaming setups, for all walks of life. How setups can be different for all types of players, and all without being at the expense of a player’s skill. Even if Howard does take aiming “more seriously” now, he says “I just feel like...I've reached a certain mastery with it, it just feels like I'm using a different tool.” 

So this does raise another question for our industry. If players like Howard can achieve high skill with different tools, can developers or companies invest in more unorthodox methods of play like this? I certainly hope so, for the sake of a playerbase that clearly wants or even needs different ways to play. Let’s just hope someone’s willing to break down even more of these barriers.

Interested in Star Rain’s content? He can be found on the following platforms:

Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter