Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game

micdrop.gg

93 pointsjohnsillings43 comments

This reminded me something you might find fascinating. We grew up playing a similar game in India. It's Antakshari[0] and it means "The game of the ending letter". There was even a popular game show for over 10 years in the 2000s on Indian TV.

I'm gonna give an English example, but in a tonal language like Hindi, Mandarin, Thai, it would make "more" sense. Players have to sign a song that starts with the same tone as the previous song ended on.The game starts with a couplet to initiate the game and since the last word of the couplet ends with an m, the first song starts with that. And yeah, only Indian/Bollywood songs are allowed but I'm gonna break that rule to make an example. Taking tones don't really make sense in English so I'll use the last word.

Player one might sing "Mamma mia, here I go again. My my, how can I resist you", and the next goes with "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, You make me happy when skies are gray." and then the next starts with gray. The person who can't find a song is out of the game, and you can't repeat songs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antakshari

cool! that sounds pretty tough, but fun!

Nice one! I built something similar [1]. It has you type in the name of the actual song and artist and the game compares it to a database of lyrics. The goal is to find as many songs as possible that contain a given word (or one of its derivatives) within one minute. Getting actual lyrics was the hardest part, so not all songs are in there.

[1] https://deriese.net/songs.html?t=hn

sick!!

I played this as a camp game when I was younger. You formed teams and just had to sing a song with a generic word like "love". Cute

I saw a real time multiplayer comedy open mic night game. I felt the premise was just fantastic even if it’s a moderation atom bomb.

That and this are clever ideas.

that sounds awesome! do you recall what it was? i'd love to check it out. (and thanks!)

Comedy Night. It’s on steam. There’s plenty of YouTube videos. Viewer beware, I expect a lot of it to be edgy cringe.

looks fun :)

Could be?: https://store.steampowered.com/app/665360/Comedy_Night/

edit, if you don't want to click steam the description says:

About This Game:

Singers, comedians, and entertainers the spotlight is yours. Tell Jokes, sing songs or just kick back, relax and share stories with strangers in the crowd.

Comedy Night is about watching raw and live talent on a virtual stage. If you are a performer see if you have what it takes to captivate an audience of friends and strangers from around the world.

You never know what you are going to get in Comedy Night it's always a new hilarious experience. The bar is always open, come join the party.

LIVE PERFORMANCES

Get up on stage, step up to the Mic and perform to a live audience in user-generated rooms.

Collaborate or go head to head with other singers and comedians in the dual mic rooms. See how long you can stay on stage before being voted off or heckled.

Comedy Night is a great sandbox to try out new material and see how well an audience responds to your performance.

BE PART OF THE AUDIENCE

Be part of the audience and decide which performers stay or go by voting them off the stage. Heckle players or encourage them as they do their best to entertain you. Sometimes the audience can be funnier than the actual acts. Great banter with strangers goes a long way in Comedy Night.

CREATE YOUR AVATAR

Choose the perfect avatar that represents you or a new persona you want the world to see. With a whole bunch of hairstyles, bodies, hats, and glasses, you will be able to create a character that is unique and one that adds spice to your performance.

That game studio is clearly using AI assets, not always disclosing them, and recycling them over multiple games. It’s a shovelware studio.

> We use Ai to detect offensive material being uploaded to use as stage backgrounds and facemasks. Ai is also used to flag offensive room names and descriptions. Use of AI art is used in some marketing material for the steam page and announcements

They don't??? Did you buy the game?

I said the studio, not the game. Look for example at Safari Cannon, which uses an obviously AI banner image but no disclosure of it.

The game was made in 2021, but that’s not the image they used until 2024.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240712235818/https://store.ste...

They might be reusing assets over their games, but the game came out in 2017, long before AI assets were a thing.

I said the studio, not the game. For Death in the Water 2, they disclose AI usage for “in game menu images”. For Safari Cannon, they’re using an obvious AI image as the main image but are not disclosing it (despite doing so in other games, so it is possible it was an honest mistake).

This looks fun! Had to open two tabs on my phone to test it before I consider sending it out to others. I often play a “sing a song from a word” game with my sister so it’s cool to see a framework around it.

happy you're into it – hope you enjoy!

(and hopefully this goes without saying, but if there's anything i can do to make it a better experience, please let me know :))

It seems very cool!! Congrats! But I can't play alone am I right? :( It would be nice for a fast testing! but no problem at all! I'm going to find one friend! :D

no single player mode (but I could add one!) – would you be interested in playing 1p beyond just kicking tires?

Yes, of course!

working on it now!

You're the best!

Sorry this came so late, but there's now a single-player mode. Just create a room and click "Start a one-player game" when you're the only one in there!

FYI: I've just played using 2 sessions in my computer, one chrome and one chrome (incognit mode). It's not the best way to have fun :D but useful for testing! Haha. Works good!!

Cool game! Looks fun. Guess I need to find some friends first, but maybe I'll try playing with them this weekend.

let me know how it goes, and if there's anything i can do to make it more fun!

Karaoke is kinda over-selling it. The entire game is just a 1-word prompt. Calling it a Singing game seems more accurate.

that's fair

It is such a funny game!

Love the game

so happy to hear it!

wow. thats an amazing concept.

nice

curious how you keep the lyric highlight in sync across players given this is browser audio, not a native client. each phone's audio pipeline has different buffering (bluetooth headphones alone can add 100-200ms of latency depending on the device), so if the highlighted line advances off local playback position rather than a shared server clock, two players on the same "beat" can end up seeing different words highlighted, which matters a lot for a game about lyrical timing. also on iOS safari specifically, an audio element started from one gesture and then paused/resumed later (someone switching tabs to grab a drink) can get stuck needing another user tap to resume playback, which for a fast round based party game would just look like the game silently broke for that person mid round.

the game doesn't play or stream any audio (though i think maybe a countdown timer or other fun sound effects would be nice)

players usually either a) play in real life on their phones or b) use something like Google Meet or Discord to sing their lyrics

that being said, the "buzz in" feature is sensitive to latency (but, in my experience, it usually takes players a few seconds to think of a song that fits the target word anyway)

I'm not the developer but I'd venture that it's a WebRTC "metadata track" over the same MediaStream the audio is going through.

Metadata tracks aren't formally part of the spec but there's ways to either inject it into the video frame data payload or encode them to audio.

There's libraries like LiveKit that abstract this and make meta tracks easy.

I don't think any web browser is able to make use of WebRTC metadata tracks.

It isn't a karaoke game there are no lyrics to sync.

Not to take away from this game, but I had a friend who said he got lots of joy from Smule. IIRC it connects you with a random stranger, you can opt into having it auto-tune your voice, and you sing duets.

It's been out for 14 years?

https://www.smule.com/

lots of sample videos on the site. I never had the nerve to play nor a place I'd feel comfortable singing out loud (apartments with thin walls)

How do you remotely sing a duet with someone and have it be in sync? You don’t have a lot of leeway before latency becomes noticeable

In Ninjam you are playing an integer multiple of measures behind everyone else: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

Each person takes turns. One person sings alone, then the other sings alongside their recording.

i've never played it, but a guy in a coffee shop (a patron) once gave me his Smule business card(!!) and i checked his songs on there; looks like they have a real cult following

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