I'm building a web-based local multiplayer party game platform. It's like a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. Back in December Gaming Couch hit the front page of Hacker News, you can check it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573
The TL;DR:
- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.
- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)
- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play
- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!
- In the future the plan is to open up the platform for 3rd party developers (and Gamejams!) as well. We'd take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking code and building the infrastructure.
Hey! Thanks for the detailed feedback, really appreciate it.
I agree with you that making games that appease everybody will not work in the long run. Did your friends give any examples of why they hated 75% of the games? Was it too much the same (e.g. too many variations of the Party Car games) or just didn't overall like the competitivness?
Wrt the lag you mentioned, that's interesting if you had such a varied experience in the same network. Is it possible that some had VPN's in use? That could be one explanation for the variance.
Also, not sure if applicable but just putting it out there that I've noticed a bug with Android+Firefox browser where the ping-indicator does not work and keeps showing +1000ms regardless of what the actual ping is. But sounds like that was not the issue here.
I actually looked at the dev competition they had! The problem was that Discord activities don't support the use of WebRTC as they require all network calls to go through their proxy. This makes real-time gaming a bit harder to implement
Thanks! I initially had the idea also 10+ years ago but only got around to do it now.. I think with the web standards having been improved and individual phone performance being much better, it's actually good that I didn't start on the idea right then and there
If you mean like utilizing gyroscope and other sensor of the phone to control the game characters (like in Wii tennis, bowling and so on), I've thought about it but I don't think it's intuitive enough to use your phone like that and I think it would make the learning curve a bit too steep. Nintendo is great at what they do and it has taken a lot from them to make Wii-games work, I don't think it would be too useful to try to copy them :)
Actually no when I asked I hadn't even made that obvious connection. I think main reason to avoid that is Wii motes had wrist slings, no doubt if you implemented phone gyroscopes it'd end with a social media post of someones damaged phone and tv.
Reflecting on my time playing Wii the sports games were ok but nothing screams 'gotta have this' to me.
Haha that's also very true. The games were ok and fun but really I think what made Nintendo games special was the 'magic' of it all. In a similar sense as their Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is not the best game but damn do I appreciate the engineering and 'magic' that the game offers, it's just so cool.
Thanks for the link, need to start ideating new games ;)
Thanks! I agree that party games really need to easy enough to just pick up and play. It's no fun spending 1-2 hours first just learning about the game mechanics. I've gotten quite nice feedback from people that don't usually play games that they've really enjoyed Gaming Couch. My overall aim is to make it simple enough that my grandma can start a game session and play without previous experience in gaming. This means a good skill/luck -ratio for each mini-game, kind of like in Mario Kart it's possible to win by chance even if you don't drive the best using items like blue shells and bullet bils. It evens out the playing field.
All of the games have been developed by me and two of my friends. We do use Cursor and models like Gemini & Claude for generic debugging as part of everyday development tools but nothing games-specific AI tools or deeply integrated workflows have been used. For refactoring large parts of a codebase, I do enjoy using Cursor specifically and I think it does speed up development efforts by quite a lot. However it's not what non-programmers usually think, that you can just write one prompt and generate a game :D
The TL;DR:
- Currently in free Early Access with 18 competitive mini-games.
- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)
- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play
- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!
- In the future the plan is to open up the platform for 3rd party developers (and Gamejams!) as well. We'd take care of the network connectivity, controllers etc.. 3rd party devs can focus on developing cool multiplayer mini-games without spending an eternity with networking code and building the infrastructure.
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