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Show HN: SimDrive – a browser racing game with your phone as the controller:D

8 pointsby 1000xcatlast Wednesday at 8:24 PM5 commentsview on HN

Games in general and multiplayer games have been a big part of what my friends do together (not just digital; sports, board + card games)

And it moved to online games as more of us moved to other places and party games became our go-to

Love jackbox and gaming couch (that I discovered here on HN)

I saw the vibej.am for this year and I couldn't think of a good enough idea till about the 3rd week but here I am!

This is a game made for me and my friends and it's also very inspired by what I thought the PS3 6-axis controller would be when I first heart about it

Thanks for reading this and I hope you and your friends enjoy playing

You can play either split screen or on separate screens with the room code or even have two split screens play too (max 8 players for now)

It started with F1 cars but working on go-karts, trucks and tuk tuks :D

I've tried to include a lot of "simulation" in the game. There's decent physics that include down force, grip etc and it even changes with/without the rain

Ideally you have an android+chrome phone so you can "feel" your driving with vibrations/haptics but otherwise you'll have just sound as feedback

Oops long post, bye


Comments

andersatoday at 12:19 PM

There need to be better instructions that you have to open the web page on your computer first, opening the link on the phone directly appears useless as it just displays a qr code on the phone.

b4rtaz__today at 11:09 AM

Nice project! I'm working on something similar, but I have different kind of games: https://padlessbox.com/

The downside is that that kind of games where you have separated joystick and the "projector", you need to have multiple servers to reduce latency for players. So if the game is for multiregion you need to have multiple servers.

vunderbalast Wednesday at 8:54 PM

Nice job. A few years back I saw a Reddit post/game about using a mobile phone’s accelerometer to control a browser-based racing game on a separate monitor, we need more games in this space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevscreens/comments/suwgqi/i_am...

https://www.collisio.club/game

Feedback

- The pink trees on Sakura really need to be fixed. The leaves themselves are offset in a strange way, they’re not centered on the actual trunk.

- It would be helpful to have a way to detect if the phone isn’t in landscape mode and prompt the user to rotate. It’s a small thing, but it would be a nice quality-of-life improvement.

- The sausage fingers hands are... distracting. I’d consider remodeling them.

show 1 reply
jacknewstoday at 11:21 AM

I've seen several of these 'party games', either standalone or platforms, but they all seem to use phones as controllers.

Are there any that can use browsers as controllers? For schools for example? Also something like the star-trek bridge-sims.