How to create your own stream companion

A logo sits in a corner and says nothing. A companion has a personality: it wanders around your scene while you play, it reacts when someone follows, and it's the same character every stream, so it does the job a face does on a channel that doesn't show one.

It's also the cheapest branding you'll ever do. No commission, no art brief, no waiting a week for a revision. In Magic Mate a companion is a pixel character you either adopt in two clicks or paint yourself on a grid, and it goes live on your stream through a single OBS browser source when it's ready.

This guide covers the whole thing: choosing a starter, drawing your own, naming and colouring it, choosing what it does between events and what it says out loud. Every example below is the real thing rather than a screenshot, so you can try it while you read.

The fastest route to a companion is to adopt one. Every account starts with Slime, and the rest of the cast joins as you go: Bot, Ghost and Cat are earned by levelling up, while the rarer ones are collected in the Store with the Magic points you pick up along the way. A Dragon with beating wings, a Phoenix wearing a living flame, a Bear, a Dog, an Elf, a Goblin, Hooty and Draco.

Whichever one you take, it wears your accent colour, so the same character on two channels doesn't read as the same companion. Here's the full cast, alive, each one in a different colour of the app.

A hand-drawn companion is what the Studio is for, and it works the way pixel art always has: a grid, a palette, and a preview that moves while you paint. Press and drag to lay down cells, and the character in the corner updates as you go.

The palette is a paint set: a brush and a colour. The brush is the body part you lay down (skin, eyes, ears, antennae, hats, wands, legs and tails, plus rarer pieces like horns, wings, flames, snouts, floppy ears, tusks and beaks), and the colour is the shade it wears. The two travel together, so a gold leg is one stroke rather than two. Beside the canvas is a bar of tools: the eraser, a step back and forward through what you've drawn, and arrows that shift the whole drawing a cell at a time.

The part worth knowing before you start is that structure carries motion. An eye blinks. An antenna, a hat, an ear and a wand sway. Legs and tails shuffle, a wing beats, a flame flickers, each on its own timing so nothing twitches in lockstep. You draw a still shape and it starts living on its own, with no frames to animate.

The canvas is 14 by 14 cells, or 20 by 20 on Be Magic when you want finer detail, and switching between them redraws what you have rather than clearing it. In the app the fancier pieces are earned by levelling or bought in the Store; the playground below opens the whole palette so you can see what each one does. Nothing here is saved, so make a mess.

A name of up to 14 characters is all it takes, and it's worth spending a minute on: it's the word chat will use. Something short and sayable beats something clever. If nothing comes, roll the dice and take whatever silly name comes out.

The colour is the choice with the longest reach. Your accent tints the companion and the whole app around it, and it's what stops a shared character from looking shared. Four colours are there from the start, and further up the ladder there are duo themes that shade the companion across two colours and glow themes that wrap it in light.

You're not limited to one, either. The Studio keeps a gallery: three companions on the free plan, as many as you like on Be Magic, with one active at a time. A summer character, a horror-month character and a serious one for tournament nights is a perfectly good way to use it.

A companion that only moves when a follow lands is a static image most of the time. What fills the gaps is the animation shelf: nineteen behaviours it plays by itself, at random, all through your stream.

Six come with every companion, and they're the calm, characterful ones: a look around, a stroll, a hop, a wave at chat, a stretch, a laugh. Premium adds the travelling and showy ones, including running, flying, dancing, eating, napping, pondering, sneezing and a peekaboo where it walks clean off frame and comes back. The last few (juggling, bubbles, a spin, air guitar, painting) are earned or bought like any other cosmetic.

Equipping is the whole interaction, and the set you equip is what it picks from. Keep three for a companion that mostly minds its own business, equip everything for a circus in the corner of your scene, or equip nothing and it simply stands there, which is a legitimate choice for a channel that wants calm.

Your companion can talk, and this is where it starts doing actual work for you. Write up to eight messages of 80 characters each, and give each one its own rhythm: anywhere from a minute to two hours between airings, with a switch to park a line without deleting it.

Use them for the things you get tired of saying yourself. A reminder to follow, where the Discord link lives, what the current run is about, the fact that VODs go up the next day. Write them in your own voice, because your companion says them in front of your chat, and set the reminders you repeat often to a shorter cadence than the asides.

Writing one is watching it land: a beat after you stop typing, the companion in the preview says the line, so you can hear how it reads before anyone else does.

Once the character is done, the overlay is one URL. Copy it, add a Browser Source to your OBS scene, paste it in and size it to your canvas. The background is transparent, so it composites straight over your game with no plugin and nothing to install, and it starts moving as soon as the source loads.

Connecting your Twitch account is what lets it hear your channel. From then on Twitch tells it directly when someone follows, subscribes, gifts, cheers or raids, and it drops what it was doing to celebrate. Follows are free on every plan; Premium adds the rest of the events and the lines it says out loud.

One habit worth keeping: that URL is the only credential the overlay has, so treat it like a password. If it ever ends up on stream by accident, refresh it and the old one dies immediately.