Thanks mind hawk, all very good suggestions. There was a notification timer that played every 5 seconds at the beginning. What i believe we should have done was force that to pop up and that unlocks the task bar icons. Additionally 2 minutes before deadline we thought of having names next to the icons to indicate what they did but didn't have time to implement.
Upon further testing post launch we had one or 2 bugs which may be why you ran into that situation. The viewers dont correlate to the total number of "chatters". Instead just the chatters sending messages is increased, so if you ban every user for example the chat will be blank. We should have added a method to produce new users but again ran out of time.
Also the missed messages at the end of the game is actually all messages that were deleted that should have been banned as we forgot a line of code 🙄
So happy you liked the idea, we had a ton of fun doing it and for 2/3 of the team (me and paul) this was our first jam.
Glad it emulated the chaos of a live stream chat. Next time we will make the user experience better for learning 😁