Fans of competitive StarCraft 2 have no doubt experienced the GameHeart observing overlay while watching events on live stream or replay. The almost ubiquitous project created by Ryan Schutter features extremely useful observing tools such as player names, resource amounts, supply status, and more. Through use of the platform, major eSports tournaments like Intel Extreme Masters and the World Championship Series have provided a much more viewer-friendly casting experience that has attracted countless more fans to live streams and to StarCraft itself.
One thing we’ve learned from Blizzard over the years is they care about their community. As the only game developer to have their own convention, community interaction and feedback has shaped the face of many Blizzard titles in the past. Ryan and Blizzard have recently announced that GameHeart will be officially integrated into StarCraft 2 and an official version created for WCS broadcasts.
Major changes to the platform include a more minimalistic layout to provide for a wider observing experience, and a player status bar that cycles between useful info like mineral and gas amounts, supply, and worker/army counts. Tournament and gamer friendly tools have also been added to help with integration of logos and branding for sponsors and eSports team names, along with adjustments to the map editor.
As a casual StarCraft 2 player that thoroughly enjoys watching high-level streams and the clarity that GameHeart provides to streaming coverage of events, this is incredible news. Not only is the platform which is already by far the best getting better, this should hopefully lead to it being used by virtually every major SC2 tournament and game caster out there.
To read more about the updates to GameHeart and it becoming an official part of the StarCraft 2 package, read Ryan’s blog post over at battle.net.