This morning, I had a foggy but glorious plan: Produce a tiny landing game on seidt.quest. Something to get my feet wet with Unity for Web or babylon.js. Making the game instead of making the game engine.

Long story short, I ended up trying to aDd NeW fEaTuRes to Hör Nicht Auf:

mhhh features 🥰

Most mobile browsers don’t autoplay video, at all. They particularly hate autoplaying sound. Sucks for me, radio boi. So as one does, I added a "tap to hör" overlay which unmutes (and plays) the video. Great UX improvement.

More importantly, I learned how one [Tap to HÖR] should be enough to autoplay as many unmuted livestreams as I want to!

Last week’s version reloaded the entire page, every 10 seconds, until a live stream was detected, and played that stream until it ended, rinse, repeat.

Turns out I can convince the existing, unmuted, playing video player to chill for a bit and autoplay the next video, unmuted as it comes online!

I finished my code, deployed and immediately found ✨two new bugs✨

Ahh, the life!

• The [Tap to HÖR] prompt appears in between videos. When there’s nothing to HÖR. Awkward.

• My uninterrupted-unmuted-undulation hack doesn’t work! Now, instead of reliably autoplaying the follow-up video, it’s unmuted, but not playing.

Why it broke and how I’m going to make it work for good

Testing a live youtube channel is super hard: You can (1) only test when it’s live and (2) gaps between videos are very rare. About 3-5 a day.

To fix this, I’ve requested live-streaming on my own channel, so I have something I control to test against.

My favorite thing about this was posting my “success” and immediate “regrets” to Instagram to lovely, supportive feedback from friends. You folks make me so so happy, and I will make this work for us.

Stay tuned :)