Comment by ChaosOp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChaosOp | Hacker News Reader

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. We just won silver at the Big Indie Pitch competition as well!

- 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 we plan to open up the platform for 3rd party developers (and Gamejams!) as well. We 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.

Interested to hear if this resonates with Hacker News readers!

A liiiiiitle more info on the games from your homepage would be nice! Then I can see if it's something worth playing. Which I'm sure it is! Congrats!

Thanks, you're absolutely right! The plan is to make individual game pages with little gif/video trailers and brief explanation of the different games but this is just something that I haven't yet gotten around to do :D

Will try it today with the kids! I thought of doing something like this, but maybe something more related to DnD.

This is cool. It looks like it's possible for devs to add their own games, similar to Airconsole. What sets your platform apart?

Thanks! Yes, or at least it will be in the future as we have not yet publicly released our SDK's for 3rd party devs :)

What sets us apart from AirConsole is our strict niche focus on real-time action party games and social couch gaming. In practice this means that the games added to our platform's public playlists should adhere to being short, competitive and real-time (no asynchronous or text/language-based trivia games).

AirConsole on the other hand is fully focused on in-car-entertainment at the moment as the whole company was recently sold to a car software manufacturer. My understanding is that they are not accepting any new 3rd party games on the platform apart from few very high-profile games based on already established studios and IP.

Neat idea. What is the controller latency like when using a mobile phone?

The platform uses WebRTC for connections so in the best case scenario (direct peer-to-peer connection): somewhere between 2-10ms. When direct connection is not available, 20-100ms. In really bad network conditions with VPN's in use: 100-300ms. Though usually the latency is not really visible in the games even if there would be larger latency with some players :)

Love this! Will give it a try

Thanks! In case you'd like to give any feedback, there's a link to my Discord server on the footer of the frontpage :)

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