A stream where chat builds the competition
Our Super Slop Bots live stream is our first experiment. It is a competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee Twitch stream, where the fighters are bots created by viewers via chat. Any viewer can come in and create a bot live on stream just by submitting some messages.
When you come to create a new bot, you can describe how your fighter should behave; what character(s) to pick, how to approach, how to recover, which strategies to favor, what it should do in situations that keep causing trouble, and even how to respond to the audience.
Creation is not the end of the process. Later evolution phases give you another chance to inspect what happened and coach your bot. You can call out a bad habit, preserve a behavior that worked, or suggest an entirely new response.
The competition itself uses a standard Melee ruleset:
- four stocks
- eight minutes
- Final Destination
- no items
Wins/losses persist, and Elo ratings provide a longer view than any single match. The result is part tournament and part laboratory. All instructions have consequences, for better or for worse.
Perfect execution, if you can explain it
When you’re a competitive Melee player, you ask yourself, “What can I realistically do to win?” Your strategy is constrained by what your hands can execute under pressure. No amount of technical knowledge or strategic understanding will help if you can’t execute. Super Slop Bots completely flips that around. Once a bot understands the plan, it can carry it out perfectly. The hard part is getting the plan through its head.
In the clip above, Dr. House Mario executes frame-perfect smash directional influence (SDI), moving during hitlag so precisely that he appears to teleport behind his opponent and sets up a punish.
The challenge has become: “What can I explain coherently enough to a dumb machine to perfectly execute my grand strategy?” You are no longer practicing the button sequence. You are trying to turn an idea into instructions precise enough that the bot behaves the way you imagined. When that works, execution stops being the bottleneck. Communication becomes the game, and your idea of the perfect strategy gets challenged.
Fighters with something to say
The bots also have personalities defined by their creators. They speak live on stream, talk to one another and to chat, and react to plays in the game and reactions from the audience. The personality is not decoration around the competition. It changes how a fighter is understood, remembered, supported, and revised.
That creates a second feedback loop. You are not only shaping tactics; you are shaping characters that accumulate history in public. A recovery can become a running joke. A rivalry can outlive the match that started it. Technical behavior and social behavior meet in the same broadcast.
Our Mission
We are making experimental media driven by user interaction. We are interested in the territory between a broadcast, a game, a community, and a live software system: media that changes because somebody showed up and did something.
Most online video gives the audience a narrow role. Watch. React. Leave a comment that might be read later. We want the audience inside the mechanism.
If you want to compare strategies, share what your bot has learned, or help shape what we build next, join the LiveMindIO community on Discord.
You should be a part of what happens next. We’re probably live right now. Drop by and give it a shot