Our focus for this week is Chris, the creator of Guardian Theater. He is one of the many community developers who has taken the Destiny API (it’s a thing that lets apps connect with the game) and found creative ways to use it. Guardian Theater allows any player to find all of the videos and streams in which they have appeared automagically. We’ll let him explain how it works.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you fit in in the Destiny Community.
Chris: Hello! I'm Chris, builder of many fine (Guardian Theater) and less-than-fine (Days With Destiny, Days Without Destiny, Destiny Directory, Guardian City) community web apps.I was introduced to the magical possibilities of the Bungie API when Eutral first announced DIM on /r/Destinythegame in the long forgotten past, and I've been hacking away at it ever since.
That is a lot of apps. You’ve been busy. Out of all those links, where do you call home on the internet?
Chris: Guardian Theater can be found at https://guardian.theater/. I can be found tweeting about Destiny things @GuardTheater and about not-Destiny things @chrisfried.
Time to find out where your allegiances lie. What is your favorite subclass and weapon?
Chris: I started my career as a Gunslinger, then moved on to Bubble Titan, and later to Hammer Bro. My favorite weapon is the unending supply of sticky grenades I receive from Armamentarium + Simmering Flames + Max Int/Dis.
I'm also quite fond of The First Curse.
‘nade spam FTW! Tell us about the Guardian Theater app. What does it do?
Chris: Guardian Theater shows you all of the Xbox Game DVR clips (if you play on Xbox) and Twitch videos (if you play on either platform) recorded by all players that participated in activities you participated in. It's great for re-living a Raid from multiple perspectives or watching yourself get wrecked in the Crucible through the eyes of your opponent. The places you're most likely to find clips are Trials, Iron Banner, and Raids.
Sounds great. I can finally go and see how many people have montaged me. Do you have any plans to expand on this idea or add any new features?
Chris: I just launched a complete rewrite of the site a few weeks ago. The biggest change is it's faster. I also added filters, language settings, better offsite links (check the settings page), ditched the infinite scroll...
Honestly, I'm catching my breath at this point, but if anyone has suggestions for what should be added next, let me know on Twitter or open an issue on Github.I've looked into expanding the idea to other games, but there's always some key piece of data missing from the API to make it happen. A huge thank you to vthornheart and the rest of the web team at Bungie for making this project (and so many others) possible.
Vthornheart and the Bnet team are smart peoples who do a great job making these cool projects possible. So… did you hear about Destiny 2 yet?
Chris: Of course! I'm excited to get my hands on the API! And to play the game.
I tweeted this joke the other day, but I think it bears repeating: I haven't been this excited about a D2 since 1994.
Guardians fly together.
Anything else you would like to add before we let you get back to work?
Chris: I should thank some peeps, while I'm here:Thank you to my good friend Dustin for cracking open the Xbox API for me, and to the rest of our Château Gaming Clanmates for turning a fun game into an inescapable social obligation.Thank you to James, the first contributor to join since I open-sourced the project. Feel free to join the fun: https://github.com/GuardianTheaterThank you to the community of third-party developers that has built itself around Destiny. You inspire me to create cool things, and you're always quick to lend a hand when needed. There are too many of you to thank individually, so I'll just thank one of you at random: thanks, Lars.I love this community. Guardian Theater and secret-scrubland have trended on the forums and the subreddit a few times and the comments are always encouraging, kind, and just a generally great ego boost. Thank you, Guardians.
We love this community, too. We never know how you will surprise us next. Guardian Theater was not something we planned for in building the API, but it’s a really cool use of the tools we provided to the community. Go search for your own name on Guardian Theater. You might have even sniped me at some point and didn’t realize it.
That’s all we have for this week, folks. We will be back again next week with a brand new community focus about bears. OK, maybe not bears. We can’t really see the tie-in with Destiny. But bears are pretty cool. You should go learn about them right now.
Anyway, if you do have an idea for who we should feature next, let us know! You can make a post on the community forum with the tag #CommunityFocus.