Build log: what broke and what I changed
This is the honest log of building TCG Machine for my own League of Legends channel: what broke, what I changed, and what is true now. I'm not an engineer by trade, I built it around a full time job, and every number below comes from my own sessions.
October 2026: Switching to the scoreboard: 24 of 27 clips approved
- Before: Clips started from loud moments. In July and August that meant 235 loud moments from one 83 minute stream, 19 final clips, and a pile full of talking head moments. A high score was not proof a clip was worth posting.
- What I changed: TCG Machine now reads the kill and assist counter on the League scoreboard and opens a clip every time it goes up, instead of starting from loud moments.
- Now: In my last session I approved 24 of the 27 clips it found, and my previous 3 sessions came out at a similar rate. The ones I skipped weren't wrong kills. They were clips that weren't about me, or had too much dead space. Since the scoreboard logic was last updated, I haven't seen it miss or double count a kill. That's one streamer on his own channel, so treat it as my result, not a benchmark.
3 to 4 August 2026: The machine said it was finished. It wasn't.
- Before: I left a recording of about 2 hours to process overnight, and the status said complete.
- What was true: The recording had been split into 10 game files. The audio scan found 12 volume spikes and 0 kill sounds. Each game's transcript had finished, but the full session transcript that captions rely on was missing. The result was 0 short clips and a status flag that had lied.
- What I changed: The machine now marks a session as incomplete instead of pretending. I also added a transcript only path, so one missing file doesn't mean re-running the whole ingest.
- Now: It can fail overnight and tell me the truth in the morning.
30 July to 4 August 2026: 235 loud moments, 19 real kills
- Before: One session claimed about 102 clips, which is just decision paralysis. After a cleanup and a redo, review had only about 8, while my scoreboard said 7/1/7. The kills weren't showing, and the pile was full of talking head moments. A good score on its own wasn't a good clip.
- What I changed: I set the editorial bar in detection: kills and won fights for whatever champion I'm playing. It isn't hardcoded to Garen, and commentary alone doesn't count.
- At the time: On an 83 minute Taric stream, it found 235 loud moments and ended with 19 final clips, all 19 kill verified. The export queue held 9. For contrast, a different session ended with 13 final clips.
- The lesson: A hook score is not proof that a clip is worth posting.
27 to 28 July 2026: My captions disappeared on upload
- Before: Spoken captions sat too low on the vertical frame. After upload they vanished, because the platform's own buttons and text covered the lower third. The review screen also didn't clearly show where the final captions would land.
- The reference: I used a screenshot from a creator I watch as the target: bold yellow text in a black box, sitting on the seam between the facecam and the gameplay.
- Why my first try failed: The burn in treated captions like lower third subtitles, and the scaling was wrong for vertical, so the margin landed somewhere other than where I thought.
- What I changed: Captions are now burned in at the seam, and the preview in Hook Studio matches the final position.
- Now: The seam is the rule. If a spoken caption sits in the lower third, that's a bug.
27 July 2026: The preview said speed ramps worked. YouTube said otherwise.
- Before: In the review screen for full match videos, the speed ramped sections looked fine. After export to YouTube, those same sections froze on a still frame while the audio kept playing.
- Why: The preview was faking the speed in the browser. The file YouTube gets is a separate render, and it joined normal speed pieces to sped up pieces in a way YouTube didn't play back properly. Old cached pieces could also reuse the broken version.
- What I changed: I fixed the real render so ramped sections move, and bumped the cache so frozen pieces aren't reused. I did not re-approve or re-upload videos that were already posted. The fix is for future sessions.
- Now: The preview isn't proof. The approved render is what YouTube gets.
Where this stands
The entries from July and August describe the earlier, audio based version of clip finding. The newest entry above is how it works now.
TCG Machine is in free beta now. If you want to follow the build, join the beta or find me on the channels linked in the footer.