Comment by BloondAndDoom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BloondAndDoom | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been looking for something like this and will try this. Looks great. I tried Amazon prime game stuff (forgot what it’s called) is not too bad but the selection of games are still not non-gamer friendly enough.

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

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

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