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Rocketcrab: Party Games for Phones
- jmiskovic 6y agoI used to play Spyfall previous incarnation (crabhat) and it was amazingly clean and robust implementation. This looks even better, with more games and a SDK! Werewolf was huge success on our gatherings, nice to see it in collection. A demo mode would help adoption a lot. It did wonders for Among Us.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoHi, rocketcrab creator here! :) Could you elaborate on what you mean by demo mode?
- jmiskovic 6y agoI would like a mode that would let me connect few dummy players and be able to switch between them to understand the flow of game. If I cannot go through joining process and all the game screens beforehand, I wouldn't suggest it in a party setting to figure it out there. Not sure how much rocketcrab can do here?
- tannerkrewson 6y agoCompletely agree about suggesting games you don't understand to a party. Nothing worse than a playing a game no one understands and ruining the fun. :( So, rocketcrab opens games in iframes, so techincally I could have a mode where it would open four or so iframes on your screen to demo a game. The problem is that this would not work for many of the games as they rely on cookies/local storage that would be messed up with multiple iframes. You could also just try opening rocketcrab as is in multiple tabs, but you'd run into the same issue with some games. Best you could do is open Chrome, Firefox, Safari/Edge, and your phone to get 4 players xD Ultimately, my plan is to add screenshots of each game. Kind of like the App Store. I've been slacking on doing it for more games cause it's a lot of work, but here's an example: https://rocketcrab.com/game/drawphone https://rocketcrab.com/game/drawphone Otherwise, developers are free to add their own demo mode (Drawphone has this!)
- alenros 6y agoInstead of opening multiple browsers, open new windows in private (incognito) mode and connect to the same game.
- polm23 6y agoAs a simpler alternative to demo mode, could you just have instructions for the games? I guess it's not hard to find rules elsewhere online, but having them right here would be helpful for introducing people.
- giovannibonetti 6y agoIt would be awesome to have a short GIF showing some gameplay
- badams2527 6y agoMy company has been playing a game to end every work week since the pandemic started, so we can try to maintain culture. This will be great, thanks for sharing!
- ikornaselur 6y agoDo you have any recommendations? In the beginning I would run "virtual game nights", by screen sharing Jackbox party games. It was simple for people to join with their phones remotely and play, but it was a bit of a hassle sometimes to set up, meaning it basically had to be me who ran the game night every time. I haven't looked around at what's out there after almost a year of a pandemic, so I'm sure there are loads of options. But would love to hear that has worked for you at work, especially if you're still doing it after all those months!
- Tokiin 6y agoAmong Us comes to mind as something that could work for you as it's a free phone game and has a large lobby size (4-10 I believe).
- goatforce5 6y agoI've recently joined an existing fully remote team. Once or twice a week someone will start an Among Us session, with a parallel Google Meet video call. People will play Among Us, and then discuss who the Imposter is in the video call. Once the game resumes, people mute their mics and disable video. It's been a neat way to spend some social time with my new colleagues. Being on non-work calls has helped me get a sense of who my new colleagues are and I feel it's helped me integrate in to the team.
- ikornaselur 6y agoOh that's a game that I've been meaning to look further into. I had just seen that it cost money and was Windows only, I forgot that it was on mobile as well (and free there!) Thanks for the suggestion!
- 6y ago
- chrisweekly 6y agoThis is awesome. Simple, open-source, clearly documented... FTW! Bravo!
- tannerkrewson 6y agothanks! :)
- aliabd 6y agoThis is awesome! Love playing games like this with my parents (long distance), but they only ever want to play on their phones and the UI is always terrible. Wish I could've tried some of the games though without needing someone else to join. Some sort of automated example or a general open room?
- alenros 6y agoWhat I usually do when testing new games is opening an incognito browser window and joining my own game.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoHello, I created rocketcrab! Who posted this?? :D thanks i guess? AMA if you want!
- chris_st 6y agoDigging around just a little, these all seem to be secret-information games (where one person/some subset are one thing, the rest are something else). Oh, and drawing games. Anything else? I guess the secret-info ones are easy to code?
- raziel2p 6y agoNot sure if it's intentional but you sound unnecessarily demeaning.
- chris_st 6y agoDefinitely not intended! My apologies. On re-reading it, it doesn't seem demeaning at all to me... but that's just my reading of it. I'd like to improve... what specifically seems demeaning to you?
- polm23 6y agoAs a random bystander it also reads as potentially pretty dismissive to me. Some points: You only note negative things, not positive things. This colors the whole post. You use italics and "Oh,", which makes it more conversational, and it sounds exasperated to me. Your questions at the end could be construed as rhetorical, rather than constructive, partly because you suppose an answer. Suggesting that the games that are there exist because they are "easy to program" could be seen as a negative comment on the creator's programming ability or drive. As the poster of this link and someone who enjoys the games a lot, I think your criticism about lack of variety is valid (if out of place for a collection of free games) and your phrasing wasn't aggressive or anything, but the above are some points that I watch out for in my own writing, particularly the first one - even if I don't like something, I find it useful to point out positive aspects to make it clear I'm trying to be constructive.
- jaimehrubiks 6y agoI like it, I play netgames.io regularly with my friends. I guess this is not just for phones, it is for any online party-link-based web games.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoright, you could play it on any device with a modern web browser. to keep things simple, i'm focusing on games that are optimized for phone-sized browsers. but it would be trivially to allow tablet/desktop only games with more complicated UI elements in the future, maybe in their own section. :) netgames.io is awesome! The developer Luke is even more awesome! The cool thing about how rocketcrab is setup is that it actually didn't require any code changes to the netgames.io games for it to work with rocketcrab. :O
- broberts01 6y agoPlease don't hijack my back button.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoWhich page did this? Rocketcrab is built with next.js so i'm kind of half using the "pages" feature. But I'm open to ideas on how to use it better :)
- meow81 6y agowhen you are browsing games, hit back button, you are taken all the back out, not to the previous page.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoahh thank you https://github.com/tannerkrewson/rocketcrab/issues/55 https://github.com/tannerkrewson/rocketcrab/issues/55
- meow81 6y agowhen you are browsing games, hit back button, you are taken all the back out, not to the previous page.
- rexpop 6y agoWhy does entering my name prompt me to auto-fill in my credit card information? That's some scary bad HTML5.
- tannerkrewson 6y agoYeah I noticed that too lol... need to look into that ... anyone know why that happens? definitely didn't do it on purpose...
- rexpop 6y agoThis should do it: <form method="post" action="/form" autocomplete="off">