Peerful Game

• Supports large groups. Because everyone controls the game with their own phone, you’re never short on controllers.
• Allows doing lots of cool things. Things you can’t do in a regular video game or any other experience at all. There’s great power in people having an entire phone to control themselves in the game.
• It’s still a very social, offline experience. You’re in the same room together. You’re still communicating, reacting to each other, maybe sharing your phone screen with allies in the game.

• If not everyone has a phone. (Or any kind of handheld device.)
• If you don’t want such a strong digital element in your games. Then you probably prefer board games instead.
• If you want a deeper and more tactical game. With so many players, using their phone to play, the Peerful games are usually simple and casual by necessity.
• If your Wi-Fi is bad. (This sounds silly, but I know, more than most, that a great internet connection is absolutely not a guarantee for many people.)

You always get a ZIP file. When extracted, it contains,

• The “main game”. Open this in the browser, on any device. Preferably something with a large screen that all players in the room can easily see.
• The “phone interface”. Copy this to your phone, then open it in your phone’s browser.
• A PDF with some documentation and guidance on the system and how to use it, in case of trouble or doubt.

@TODO: I can’t expect people to all put a game file on their phones. I need a better system if I ever want to sell these here. –> The main game could actually start a server on that computer? So phones can just connect to that? Or do I assume some burden here and add a simple web page for phones to visit (all games), and promise to host that forever?

These games were obviously inspired by the Jackbox games. I challenged myself to figure out how they did it and make such a framework myself long ago. That attempt was bad and filled with issues, but it’s still my most visited/like code repository online. It seems many people are interested in these kinds of games.

But, well, it is hard. It’s so hard to connect devices, deal with disconnects/Wi-Fi issues, deal with the delay in input and response. That’s why we’re not really making these right now, even though I figured out the framework and have most issues ironed out. In the future, I hope to have the funding for a dedicated server that would make these much more viable and sustainable.