Being a regular streamer on Twitch requires a tremendous amount of time, knowledge and patience. It means juggling your attention between playing the game you love and building a community around it, and some of the best streamers on Twitch find a delicate means of balancing both. It's a tough job but the rewards are great if you've got the time.

Fortunately for Tenno Snowlit not only has the time, but more than enough enthusiasm to boot. Her regular streams have become well known for being helpful sources of information for new and veteran Tenno alike. Despite having such intense streaming schedule we were able to steal a bit of time from Snowlit to talk a little bit about what's involved in the life of a Warframe streamer. Thankfully, she was happy to tell us!

Tell us a bit about yourself!

On Twitch I'm known as Snowlit. A lot of times I tell my viewers to call me Snow or Snowy, and then I have a videogaming nickname that my friends called me before I started streaming; that was Circe, like the Greek Goddess. I've been streaming since early December of 2014, so it's almost a year now.

I started with Warframe. That's where my Twitch channel grew primarily from and I've been playing it almost every day since. I take one day a week off but other than that Twitch has kinda been my life for the last year or so.

Oh, I'm 27, I live in Colorado now, and I love snow, winter, and snowboarding! It's why the theme of my channel is around snow and winter. My channel focuses a lot on viewer interaction. When I stream a lot of Warframe I usually like to teach the game to new players. It's just a really chill, laid back community we have. I always get people to come in and ask about Warframe, and I love telling people about it.

What originally got you into Warframe?

It was actually my boyfriend who mentioned to me around this time last year. I wasn't into shooters that much. I had played Borderlands before but it never really clicked with me, but when I tried Warframe for some reason I got really addicted.

I'm not sure if it's because it was a third person shooter or if it was because the overall theme was really unique. You know, being in space and having a sci-fi concept. That really drew me in, and so I started playing it. I kept playing it and after two weeks of playing I thought maybe I should start streaming it. Things kinda took off from there.

Woah, so nothing specifically inspired you to streaming Warframe?

Not really, it was kind of by accident actually! I had just built my current rig and thought, I can stream now and I love this game. Now that I have the equipment to be able to stream, let's try it out. It just accidentally took off.

Streaming regularly is a pretty huge time commitment. Could you walk us through an average day for you?

I've had a few schedule changes but now during the weekdays I stream from 11 a.m. MST to about 6 p.m. MST. I usually wake up an hour or an hour and a half before I start -- well I try to. My schedule doesn't always work out sometimes because of sleep, hahaha.

I get everything ready, eat breakfast, check Twitter and social media, and catch up on things like that while getting ready for the stream. I start it around 11 or as close to the start time as I can. I go pretty much for the entirety of the day and after that I eat dinner and prepare for bed.

It is basically a full time job for me currently, and it does take a lot of time. Not just streaming during my hours but there's a lot off stream work involved as well. There's responding to your viewers on social media, responding to private messages on Twitch, things like that. It's a very involved…I don't want to say "job" since I enjoy it so much. It doesn’t feel like a job, you know?

It's just something I really enjoy doing. A lot of the time it's networking. I mean, it's called networking but it feels like I'm just hanging out with friends. Meeting other streamers, talking to my community, that sort of thing.

Do you find there are any unique challenges with streaming Warframe?

When you're trying to stream a high movement and high action game like Warframe it's not the clearest quality even when you have the highest settings. So there's that in terms of actual video quality.

In terms of streaming Warframe, the Twitch community for Warframe is actually fairly small compared to games like League of Legends or CS:GO. But because of that you have a closer connection with players or viewers that come in to that game directory to watch. You can talk to them easier -- it's not a crazy 500 chat messages a minute kinda deal.

Even when I visited other Warframe streamers the community is not huge but it's also not too small either. I find there's always new people that come into the Warframe Twitch community. I don't think there are that many challenges.

When I first started I actually streamed without a webcam. I was primarily a voice Twitch streamer which was probably about eight months of my streaming time. What people liked about my stream was my voice and how soothing it was. When I added the webcam I added another way to interact with viewers, so that helped the stream.

I would say that even if you don't use a webcam, because there's already so much happening on the screen, it's definitely not an issue.

You said earlier you did a lot of community interaction while streaming, could you give us an example of what you mean?

Well, what I do is I have two monitors. Warframe is on one monitor and then on the other one I have all the Twitch stuff. I don't watch my own stream while I'm streaming but I do have the chat pulled up. As viewers and followers are chatting I can respond to them in real time, which is what makes it unique compared to Youtube. With Youtube you don't have the real life interaction immediately, but with Twitch it's unique because as you're creating the content viewers get to interact with you.

At the beginning of my stream I spend 10 to 20 minutes just talking to my viewers. This is every single stream. I usually just have a starting screen with my webcam and Warframe as a smaller screen. I talk to my viewers, greet them, tell them how my day was, ask them how their day is going…kinda what you would do if you were just talking with your friends.

I emphasize that because it's an atmosphere where no matter what's going on in your day, whether you've had a bad day at work or at school, you can come to this stream and just relax. Take your mind off things and really just have a good time.

Do you have a favorite build to run while streaming?

A lot of my viewers know that I love Nova Prime. She's my favorite Warframe. I play her probably 95% of the time that I stream, hahaha!

As for my build, I always run a slow Nova. Positive power strength, a lot of duration. I actually do more duration than anything else. I want to say it's like 280% plus, but I just love it. Nova is a lot of fun to play and I've kinda become iconic with my Nova because people have always asked me how I get my color scheme. I actually have a command in my chat to tell people how to get my color scheme because people ask so much!

Loadout wise I have the Tonkor and the Paris Prime. Paris Prime is probably my favorite, I love bows in the game a lot. As for secondary, it's the Vaykor Marelok. I just love the style associated with that weapon. Scindo Prime is my favorite melee.

Any advice for would-be future Warframe streamers?

Be consistent! If you want to take streaming semi-seriously then I would say consistency is key. Having a schedule and letting your community know when you're going to stream is one of the most important elements to growing a Twitch stream.

Secondly, just be friendly and have fun. That's the number one rule, really. If you're having fun with the game and it shows through your stream people are going to want to keep coming back. That's really how you grow the stream. Just have fun, don't try to be who you're not, and do whatever makes you comfortable.

Interact with your viewers! When they come in and say hi, say hi back. Talk to them. Ask about their day. If they feel like you're an approachable person they're going to want to come back. That would be my advice.

It's an absolute pleasure watching you. Thanks for joining us, and for all of your hard work representing Warframe on Twitch!

Thank you so much!

Another tremendous 'thank you' goes out to Snowlit and the entire Snow Army for making Warframe's presence on Twitch such a welcoming place to be! If you're interested in following Snowlit on Twitch be sure to check out her channel at http://www.twitch.tv/snowlit. You can also follow her on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter for all her latest updates!