Still working on Gaming Couch, 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
At the moment working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend!
If you're an interested game dev that would like to beta test the dev tools, hit me up either here, via Discord (link available from https://gamingcouch.com) or by emailing me at gc[dot]community[at]gamingcouch[dot]com!
The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:
- 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!
Very cool! Opened a PR to add my local multiplayer game platform, Gaming Couch (https://gamingcouch.com), to the list of games :) Just recently posted a ShowHN post about it which hit the front page and generated so much great feedback and discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344573
In a nutshell its a web-based game platform where up to 8 players use their smartphones as controllers to play real-time action mini-games on a central browser screen. It takes a lot of inspiration from classic party games like Jackbox, Mario Party and Mario Kart.
I saw your post a while back and decided to try out your game while a few friends were over. Everyone had a blast! Great work on the game, looking forward to more modes in the future :)
Awesome to hear! Bunch of new things in plans for the near future, including 3rd party dev tools so that other devs can also make new games for the platform. Hopefully a lot more games to play after that :)
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 ;)
At the moment working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend!
If you're an interested game dev that would like to beta test the dev tools, hit me up either here, via Discord (link available from https://gamingcouch.com) or by emailing me at gc[dot]community[at]gamingcouch[dot]com!
The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:
- 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!
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