How to add a companion overlay to your Twitch stream

A companion is a small animated character that sits on your stream, in its own layer, over whatever you're playing. It isn't a chat bot and it isn't an alert box that flashes for two seconds and disappears. It's there the whole time you are.

Two things make it feel alive. Between events it behaves on its own: it looks around, wanders a little, stretches, naps, waves at chat, and once in a while walks clean off frame and peeks back in. And when something happens on your channel, it reacts to that specific thing, with its own scene per event.

Technically it's one browser source in OBS with a transparent background, so it composites straight over your scene without a green screen, a plugin, or anything to install.

Easier shown than described, so here it is. Press a reaction and watch what a follow, a sub, a gift, a cheer or a raid looks like on stream, or play one of the animations it gets up to between them.

A stream with nothing moving on it reads as empty, especially in the quiet stretches every channel has. A companion fills those without you having to perform: there's always something small happening in the corner of the frame.

It also makes your channel's moments visible. A new follower is a number in a dashboard nobody watching can see. A companion that stops what it's doing and celebrates turns that into a beat everyone in chat notices, which is exactly the moment people talk.

And it's yours. You draw it, name it, pick its colour and choose which reaction plays for each event, so two channels running the same tool never look alike. That's the part a stock overlay pack can't give you.

Start with the character. Pick one of the ready-made companions or draw your own cell by cell in the Editor, then give it a name. Its colour is your theme colour, picked from the button next to your picture on any page, and it follows the companion onto the overlay so it matches the rest of your branding rather than fighting it.

Then choose how it reacts, on the Events tab. Each event offers four genuinely different scenes: a follow can melt on the spot, burst into hearts, take a bow or be handed a bouquet. A raid can be a rocket launch, a stampede, a portal or a parade. Every one plays in the preview beside you before you commit to it.

Bigger events can get their own scene. A sub, a gift, a cheer or a raid arrives with a size, so you can leave every one of them on the same scene or give the large ones something louder, and anything you don't set stays as the one above it.

Last, its animations, on the Idle tab. Those are the behaviours it plays by itself, at random, all through your stream. Equip the ones that suit your channel: a calm companion that mostly looks around and stretches, or one that runs, dances and disappears off frame.

Here's the full menu you pick from, five events and four scenes each.

Every scene can carry a sound, and every one of them is off until you switch it on, which is the right default for something that will fire while you're talking. Pick per scene from a shelf named for what things sound like, arcade, horror, chill, and set how loud it plays. Then listen to the whole set once with your headphones on, because a sound that's charming in a settings page is a different thing over a game at full volume.

The other half is the name tag: the name of whoever just followed, subscribed or raided you, printed beside the scene. It sits above, below or to either side of your companion and is sized to fit your scene, and it's drawn in your theme colour like everything else.

This is what turns a celebration into an acknowledgement. A companion that dances for an anonymous event is decoration; one that dances and names the person is your channel thanking them by name, in front of everybody watching.

Connecting your Twitch account is what lets the companion hear your channel. It subscribes to the events you switched on, and from then on Twitch tells it directly when someone follows, subscribes, gifts, cheers or raids. Each event has its own toggle, so a channel that would rather not celebrate cheers simply doesn't.

This is also where a silent companion usually gets fixed. A transparent overlay with nothing happening looks the same whether your channel is quiet, your connection expired, or a permission was never granted. The page says which of the three it is, and hands you the reconnect button when that's the answer, so check there before you go hunting through OBS.

The overlay is a single URL. Copy it, then in OBS add a Browser Source to your scene and paste it in. Set its size to match your canvas, since the source is a transparent stage the companion moves around in rather than a fixed image.

Keep the source above your game capture and below your webcam if you want the companion to pass behind you. It starts moving the moment the source loads, so you can frame and position it right there, before you ever go live.

One thing worth knowing: that URL is the only credential the overlay has, so treat it like a password. If it leaks, or you show it on stream by accident, refresh it and the old one stops working immediately.

None of this is specific to Magic Mate: it is the standard way OBS puts a web page into a scene. OBS calls it a Browser Source, it ships with the full installer so there is nothing extra to download, and it renders your overlay the same way a browser would. Any tool that gives you an overlay link is asking you to add one of these.

Once it's on your stream, the last step is letting the people watching press the button. Any of your companion's moves can be put on your channel as a channel-point reward: you set what it costs and how long the cooldown is, and it appears in your channel's own rewards list like anything else you sell for points.

When someone redeems it, the move plays on your overlay, with their name on it. That's a viewer spending points they earned watching you to make something happen on screen, which is a far better use of channel points than a title change nobody sees.

Two honest caveats. Channel points are a Twitch feature that opens up when you become an Affiliate, which is the first milestone a small channel aims at, so this waits for you there rather than working today on a brand new channel. And the free plan caps how many moves you can have on sale at once, which is enough for a real little menu without being the whole shelf.