At the moment working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend!

If you're an interested game dev that would like to beta test the dev tools, hit me up either here, via Discord (link available from https://gamingcouch.com) or by emailing me at gc[dot]community[at]gamingcouch[dot]com!

The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:

- 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!

At the moment working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend!

If you're an interested game dev that would like to beta test the dev tools, hit me up either here, via Discord (link available from https://gamingcouch.com) or by emailing me at gc[dot]community[at]gamingcouch[dot]com!

The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:

- 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 a nutshell its a web-based game platform where up to 8 players use their smartphones as controllers to play real-time action mini-games on a central browser screen. It takes a lot of inspiration from classic party games like Jackbox, Mario Party and Mario Kart.

The TL;DR:

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

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.

Thanks for the link, need to start ideating new games ;)

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