Show HN: Willow Patch Games - online games with friends and family | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Willow Patch Games - online games with friends and family

willowpatchgames.com

39 pointscipherboy36 comments

Just played a game. Impressions in vrac:

- The website is very... monochrome. Seems like a very basic theme. The UI is not adapted to a desktop (vertical, hidden menu), I haven't visited the website on mobile. I wouldn't expect that from a game website.

- The rules need images!

- It's missing a rules button in the game interface that doesn't change page, but opens a popup or something similar.

- More colors!

- There's scrolling in the play area, remove them.

- Without the direct link for a game found in the HN comments, I would never have gotten to even play a game. It seems there's no way to create a game as a guest. I hate registering on websites, if you ask me to register before I even can see what the game looks like, I won't.

- Is there a chat? I might have missed it. It seems like an important feature if your goal is to have far away friends play together.

- Games? I see only one, and nowhere I can find mention of others in work.

About the pricing:

- For the free tier, I don't understand what you mean by "Freely given to all users; limit one."

- Subjectively, I dislike the "pay what you want". It's like tipping, I don't like feeling cheap by tipping too little, I don't like feeling like I'm wasting money tipping too much. Either way, I will feel bad.

- The pay for 10/20 games is... surprising. Seeing how fast the games are (2 minutes per game!), the minimum price of $2 for 10 games is exorbitant. Specially for something that seems in alpha. I want a monthly subscription, not a "pay for X number of games".

- And most of all... this is very, very early access. There's only one very basic game. There's many free online multiplayers games out there, more complexe and polished. What do you do (will do) to differentiate from them?

- The game itself is fun.

Yeah, pricing is a little up in the air. And yes, very early on in the grand scheme of things. :)

> (2 minutes per game!)

Sorry, I was creating short games so we could get people in and they could try it out. About 20 tiles per player. You can go up to 75 or 100 tiles per player, and those games tend to go on for a lot longer. Playing with friends for an hour or so usually places us around 10 games, we usually do about 50 per player. YMMV of course, depending on your host, your group of friends, and what letter distribution you use. :D

Thanks for playing and the feedback though!

> - Is there a chat? I might have missed it. It seems like an important feature if your goal is to have far away friends play together.

Not yet, working on that :) Figuring out how to integrate Jitsi into another site is a fun challenge that spans multiple weekends.

On the pricing side, it's worth noting that Board Game Arena offers dozens of popular licensed games with a load of features for €24/year/user, which is a pretty aggresive pricepoint. Maybe something to aim for?

I didn't have any luck getting a game started. For some reason the "number of players" keeps getting set to 0.

https://i.imgur.com/8Q4bdC1.png

\o hey there; sorry to hear.

The little secret is that "Number of players" in the configuration doesn't actually matter. When people join the room/game, they start as spectator and you (the host) flip it on and they become players. (I wish I could figure out how to put the "off" label on the other side of the switch so it is more obvious, but when I can, I have the label describe the current state of the switch).

I always create a game and then realize afterwards that more people than I expected joined. :-) I've found it best leave to the calculations (tiles per player in particular) until I actually press the start button.

So, as long as you have two players or more in the game, should be good to go.

Feel free to email me if you're still having issues; willowpatchgames@gmail.com.

Ah, I see!

Couldn't find any information about the games available to play (there's only one page for rules, so it appears only one game is available). Couldn't create a game after creating an account. It's not clear that this site is even at the MVP stage?

Bounced off this hard.

Yeah, I couldn't find a reason to play a game. There's no screenshots or videos.

You can play as a guest as it seems but you can't try anything out without a game code.

This exactly. You need something to pull people. Could not play and could not even find a list of games I could have played. :(

Same thing for me.

I couldn't find any information about what games I can play or host. Why would I sign up for a mystery product? Please focus your landing pages on the service you provide.

I’ve organised a few social events for work, family and friends using services like these so this is something that does very much appeal to me. So there’s definitely a market for this kind of stuff but it’s also quite a competitive market. To that end, I don’t think your landing page does a good enough job of selling your product. You sell your company name, introduce me to your team, all of which I’m sure is important to you, but all I’d be interested in is which games you’ve got, how much fun they are to play and how I can play them remotely with friends.

The latter point appears easy enough when looking at the join options. But none of this is addressed on the landing page. You don’t even appear to have any pictures of the games anywhere on your site (maybe you do once you’ve signed up? But how many people are going to sign up blind?)

I really do like your mission statement but bare in mind that sometimes “gaudy” designs are picked because they look more “fun”. The site design currently doesn’t project “fun” to me. It looks more like a business page. I’m not suggesting you need to make the site gimmicky but take a look at the way how other games are marketed. This might intentionally be trying to buck the trend but that will likely cost you more customers than it attracts.

Also the pricing is a little confusing. I think you might be better off with fewer price points but define them more clearly. A little bit of the confusion I had was also because without seeing what content you had on your portal (or even what the portal looks like) it’s hard to understand what you’re paying for.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this and seeing how it progresses because, as I said, I do organise a lot of events so always on the look out for new ways to entertain groups.

Agreed, we have a lot of work ahead of us. :-)

Drop us an email (willowpatchgames@gmail.com) when you are ready and I'd love to hear what games you usually play.

Trying again since my earlier post didn't get much traction :-)

Hey HN!

I’m Alex Scheel, co-founder of Willow Patch Games (https://willowpatchgames.com#about).

We’re creating online games that are fun to play with friends and families unable to meet in person during these times. Unlike most other competitors in this space, we’re looking to keep things simple: we’d like to bootstrap the company, we won’t sell user data for advertisements, and we’ll avoid gaudy graphics that require the latest phone as much as possible. We’re trying to be good stewards and provide quality games rather than being just another race-to-the-bottom game company. We’re trying to be as friendly to join and play as possible: joining someone’s game will always be free.

I started this project in August with my brother, Nick, our other co-founder. We’re still in the early stages, but very curious to hear feedback about what we’ve built so far. We have lots of ideas and plans for the future but figured we might as well see what HN has to say! At least for us, we've had a lot of fun playing this under our states' quarantines. We've recruited several friends and family members to help beta test and it has been a blast reconnecting with everyone.

Some cool things we have brewing are:

- Video and text chat integration

- Other types of games, including some of our favorite card games

- Improving the experience on older devices

- Building mobile apps

- Alternative dictionary support

Feel free to email us at willowpatchgames@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Let us know what you think and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Hi, great comment explaining what your project is about, it makes me want to try it.

However the website should be redesigned in my opinion. You only get a few seconds of a visitor's attention before he leaves the page. There is no visual anywhere, one has to create an account or join a room to even see what are these games about.

I clicked around a few pages, saw walls of text and got bored.

Yes, show me what the game is. The main block of text I get after clicking is telling me the story of your company, I want to know what the game is, and see screenshots.

If anyone wants to play, I'll be here:

https://willowpatchgames.com/?code=rc-ahuhe-9yk1m-ocjm1-3242...

(And thanks dang for the second chance!)

Shameless plug. I've got my own little online multiplayer game I made for fun I'm pleased with. https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/

At the start of lockdown I was inspired to make my own version of Yatzy (Yhatzee?) to play with friends. We tried to find somewhere to play Yatzy together and all the versions we found were full of social media signups and micro-transaction.

We wanted something simple to jump in and play in the browser. The https://www.horsepaste.com copy of CodeNames is a really good example of this done well.

It took a couple of days to make. There's some bad development practices in there. Like heavy use of polling (I've since learned about WebSockets). And I wish I hadn't made the frontend in JQuery. But I'm quite pleased with result. Its had a few hundred successful games finished through it and I learned a lot. Once I sort some of the awful code messes I'll open source it.

Anyways if anyone's interested its very easy to jump in and start a game.

https://yatzyonline.azurewebsites.net/

Congrats! It would nice to have an overview of what games are available to play. The only hint I got was rules for Rush!.

Yeah right now all we have is a single game. We have more up our sleeve so to speak, but they're a little ways out :)

This is cool! I've been using something similar called Backyard (https://backyard.co/) for game nights with friends - they've got video, voice and text chat with a whole host of games all in one place. I think your site would benefit from some of the same design decisions they've made like showing a snapshot of a game and available titles on the homepage. Also, my squad loves the backyard whiteboard since we can use it for student group projects and stuff when we're not trying to play

It could be because of my browser settings / extensions, but I couldn't find any information about the games you can play on the site. It looks like you have to have a paid account to see the list of available games. From a guest account the "Play a Game" page is blank. I would suggest making the games themselves more front and center, as right now the site almost feels like a business-to-business site telling me more about the company itself than the products.

That's what I thought, too. I see no screenshots for the game. Places like BoardGameArena.com are a better model.

Another shameless plug, my girlfriend and I created an online multiplayer game during the first lockdown. The game was inspired by an instagram filter that was trending at the time. We've had over 12k unique users so far.

https://gibberishgame.com

The game was made in unity. The service used for the multiplayer portion is called photon.

There's more information about the company name than there is showing whatever game is available. Should be the reverse.

Wish there were pictures easily found on the main landing page of the game.

I tried to try it out but didn’t get admitted into a room.

There’s only text in the rules, so it’s hard for me to know what type of game this is.

I think investing in some better UI would be great :)

Good job shipping something! Just a little too much friction IMO

Also as a shameless plug since I never made it to the first page either :) Would love some feedback on real-time video enabled multiplayer gaming https://multiplayer.app/

Only Jigsaw works right now.

Couldn't figure out how to play a game. Kept getting a missing parameters message.

I tried to play, even joined my own game as a guest via incognito mode - but couldn't start the game. I set # of players to 2 but every time I clicked start it said the game was configured to have 0 players which is invalid.

How does one play as a guest?

Ah sorry, I need to make that more clear. Currently you need to sign up to create a new game or a room with multiple games. Guest play is only for joining an existing game.

Join this one: https://willowpatchgames.com/?code=rc-ahuhe-9yk1m-ocjm1-3242...

:-)

Great, thanks! Seemed like a fun idea. The goal / scoring seemed a big vague to me.

An option to click on a letter piece and then click on a tile to transfer it to that tile would be cool. Drag and drop works, but felt like a hassle at times.

This is the first week the server has felt solid enough to stand up to HN so I figured I'd risk it ;-)

Goal is to play all your tiles on the board. You then draw (assuming everything is valid). Everyone now gets a tile. Last person to draw wins (hence, "rush"-ing to draw).

I'll clarify the rules :-)

It certainly needs more help with explaining the game. I used the link below to join but could not figure out how to play. What do the buttons on the grid page do? Might be helpful to post some info.

Sorry folks, I've gotta make dinner. I'll be back in an hour or so to play some more. If anyone's interested, email me at willowpatchgames@gmail.com :-)

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