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Totally agree with your thoughts on jackbox, they're fun but not gaming. Def saving this for later.
Slightly different approach, each plays in their browser/phone and there is no “main display”. And my games are cooperative.
I’m releasing a new game BossBattle soon so keep your eyes peeled.
For people who'd like to support the project, get rid of the few ads and possibly also some other extra-features such as in-game avatar wearables or similar, there could be a subscription option as well.
Interested to hear what the options you were thinking of were? Nothing is yet implemented on that regard so this is a good time to influence the outcome :D
Personally, I think as long as the price is right, and you include some screenshots/trailers, most people wouldn't mind this model - particularly if you're able to choose your games, which I think would be a huge plus
Emphasis mine. Sounds like they're not ruling it out.
Anyway I think this would be an amazing thing to let other people contribute to as this is an entire industry of hypercasual games which could easily be ported to this minus the annoying ads
The way I've been thinking it could work is that developers can upload their own games to the platform and by default the games would only be visible under their own accounts and in order to play the uploaded game the developer account would have to be in the session.
Then if the developer would like to publish their game for others to play as well they could just check a box. After that the game would go to a "New drops" playlist where players everywhere can test out different new games and rate them at the end. The games gathering most votes would then be upgraded to the main playlists. In a nutshell the system would work somewhat similar to HN frontpage and new submission pools
If Im having people over I would never start a PC and ask them to hunker down, turning on the tv though…
It would be nice to be able to mix game pads and smart phones -- when gaming with kids, none of my kids have smart phones yet, so it would be nice to be able to let them use Switch controllers if we have those on hand, or use phones if we don't.
Regardless, I'm interested in this, and would be interested in contributing a game or two. This seems excellent!
Would you be interested in also beta-testing our upcoming 3rd party game development SDK? If so, please ping me on our Discord (link at the end of the gamingcouch.com web page) so I can take your contact details for the beta-testing list :)
I’ve spent several hours over the holidays searching for something my family can play and coming up empty.
The game that most often works is Song Pop Party on Apple TV, but non-apple phones have a second rate experience and keep disconnecting.
Ideally we’d have a trivia game as I also want to engage some older folks, but the leasing trivia game on Apple TV is way too US specific and hard for our family to enjoy.
There used to be a game show on local TV in the late nineties called “Noot vir Noot” (note by note) that had a whole bunch of games based on music that was familiar to the local market. I’ve been chasing something like that for years and not come close.
I guess the point of my rambling is that I LOVE the phones-as-controllers approach to party games, but many seem to focus on Nintendo-esque experiences, rather than quiz game like experiences.
I am aware of the Jackbox games but haven’t looked at the recent releases. They were hit and miss with the family in the past, with many of the non-english first language folks often not getting it.
It’s not so much the language as the content. Songs and pop culture that 30-60 year old South Africans would be familiar with.
If you like more quiz like games, I can recommend Kahoot & Gametje for you, which work with a similar phones-as-controllers approach :)
If you prefer more quiz/slower paced games akin to Jackbox. You can check out my project which was also on HackerNews recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887709
A gaming platform like this hits all the pain points, I'll try it soon and see if the games are good, thanks!
AirConsole link for context: https://www.airconsole.com/
Instead I want to focus on very short action-based party mini-games. All of the mini-games are tied together via a scoreboard & party voting system. While each of the mini-games might look different, the goal is always the same (be the last player standing to gather most points). In the end, after 5, 10, 15 or 20 mini-games you'll get to see who will be crowned the king of the Gaming Couch. The emphasis is on the social aspect of gaming as opposed to individual game lore or intricate game mechanics
We tried most of the game options and had really great fun with all of it. Everything worked fine, no issues, no desync, and it didn't destroy battery life on the phone controllers either. I'd say the ferry race and the parking games were my favourite overall, but the others aren't bad by any means! So, thanks a lot for your work, and I'll definitely be returning to Gaming Couch with my group!
And for a question: Do you have plans to monetize the platform in the future? If so, can you share any details on how that would work?
With regards to monetization, I opened it up a bit down the chain but the main point was that nothing is yet set in stone. I'd like to keep it as easily accessible as possible so everyone can play regardless of if they have the means to pay or not. Naturally this would drive me towards ads, but I don't want to turn the platform to "Hulu" with their annoying ads. If the service would have ads, in my opinion it should also have a way to turn them off, this could be done via subscription or similar method for those wanting to support the project and possible get few extra-perks.
With regards to 3rd party developers who develop games for the platform, I think it would be fair to implement some kind of revenue share model, which could be based on e.g. minutes played so the most liked and played games also get rewarded.
But as nothing is yet implemented, this is still very much in the air and I'm very open to any suggestions!
The hardest so far was Japanese. The easiest, strangely enough, was Mandarin—which was like 97% accurate out of the box using Claude.
Party games need to pick and play, I’m long time gamer, if I want to play MP with other gamers I got million games, but I want to play with random people who never gamed aging from 9-60. Now that’s a challenge, not sure of the games you have this demographic.
Having said that, did you develop all of the games yourself? I’ve done some game dev but haven’t touched it for a while, I’m curious if AI actually speeds up the development of this kind of small games? Any experience on that? I love some aspects of game dev but it gets super tedious if you want a certain experience, would’ve been great to get AI to do that :) (i did Godot). I heard good things about unity+AI
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
Reflecting on my time playing Wii the sports games were ok but nothing screams 'gotta have this' to me.
If I could give one unsolicited piece of inspiration it'd be to watch this episode of Community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOueERJzjrU
There is definitely and awesome couch multiplayer game in there somewhere
Thanks for the link, need to start ideating new games ;)
Ha just scrolled past this
The product: The accessibility is key. Telling people to "scan the QR code" is great for getting it going.
The games: They're great. I love the variety and creativity. One problem is I had friends saying "They hate 75% of the games", and I don't know how you fix that - The games some players hate, other players _love_. But as someone who used to be in the game industry, I can promise you trying to make a game nobody hates is how you end up with bland flavor. Please don't end up there.
The lag: I don't know what it is - are the channels backlogged or what - But I would say 20-30% of devices are _unplayable_. It's not like the inputs are delayed, it's that they're fully unpredictable about whether they will register (and for how long). Same browsers, same Android OEM, same Wifi network and just... lag. The game says 1000ms+, but even when it says 200 it's laggy. This is probably your biggest issue, since in a 5 player party game, 1 or 2 people not having fun kills the mood.
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.
No VPN usage. Maybe some were incorrectly being routed to TURN?
> why they hated 75% of the games?
Personally, the Chow games are a little disorientating. I didn't ask for specifics from others
Would love to port some of those game ideas to this platform when you open up the developer platform.
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