Retro Heart

Twitch has been pushing these *hard* the last several weeks. You can't go anywhere on the creator side without tripping over something pushing you to try them. You'll be getting roughly the same experience as you would from Streamlabs or StreamElements, though they're not *quite* the same and the feature set isn't always as robust. Still, if you need alerts that are easy to set up and instantly recognizable, this is likely going to be your best choice to hit the ground running. (Affiliates and higher also get two "free" animated emote slots that are unlocked for 60 days starting from the last time an alert was triggered, but they aren't permanent. If you want the slots but don't want to use Twitch's alert system on stream, it's pretty trivial to shove them into a scene you don't use. It's a big secret, don't tell anyone.)

I've talked a lot about how I use SAMMI Stream Deck, a free software, in the past. It allows you to take complete control of pretty much every aspect of your stream, and as a result the lack of out-of-the-box solutions can make it feel pretty overwhelming. If Twitch's alert boxes are a single tool, SAMMI is the whole damn workshop. That said, SAMMI has a lot of extensions, tutorials, and a knowledge base that can help you get started by hovering over any command and pressing F1 to be taken to the help page for it.

You can use it to make alerts like this and whatever else you put your mind to.

I also put together a deck of example buttons if you want to it to get started and for inspiration!

Created by Zaytri, Slime2 is an emerging platform for stream widgets, and in particular, has a few different chat overlay options. They're also very easy to set up! Most use a local HTML file that you can drag and drop into OBS, with width and height that scale automatically based on the size set in the Browser Source settings in OBS (not the Transform tool, god please do not use the transform tool) of a browser source.

Opening the HTML file will typically bring up baked-in options that you can use to customize things to your liking. Can't recommend this enough.

This *might* be for you. I'll admit I barely know anything about CSS, but I gravitated towards this as it doesn't rely on an existing service like Nightbot or wrestling with trying to reskin Twitch chat. But if you're interested in making your own chat overlay, you've probably already got a better grasp on the necessary tools than I do, and Comfy.js seems like a good library to grab everything you need, including icons and emotes.