Ever since I was young, I have always loved all things video games. I grew up wanting to become a video game developer for my career. While I have moved past that dream, I am still very interested in game development and design and have taken to trying out some development in my spare time. It can always be hard to actually sit down and have enough time to develop something. Luckily my university has a Game Design Club which hosts a quarterly game jam where people take a weekend and spend it making a somewhat playable thing you could consider to be a game. I took this opportunity to try out a new technology that I am very intrigued by: AirConsole.

AirConsole is a web service that allows you to create video games that use a web browser on a laptop as the screen and a web browser or native app on mobile devices as the controllers. This allows developers to get more creative with the interactions that the individual player can take since they can do more and do it at the same time as others. The API they provide is extremely simple and acts as a message passing service between the screen and controllers.

My first impression of AirConsole was great. It is a fantastic service and I am very excited to see where it goes in the future. Being able to have anyone with a phone easily join a play a game with you makes it the most accessible game console around. While they only have about 30 games available right now, it is increasing slowly and steadily and in all genres of games. My favorite game I have played so far is IRIS, I am a big fan of tactics games and being able to play with my friends took it up to the next notch. After playing around with AirConsole I knew I wanted to develop my own games for it.

Christmas Eve, my game jam entry

The game I ended up creating for the game jam, under the theme “I need help” is called Christmas Eve. You play as Santa’s elves on Christmas Eve trying to help make as many presents as you can in the last two minutes before Santa needs to leave, with gameplay inspired by the game Overcooked. You can play the game here if you are interested however you will need to figure out the rules yourself.

More importantly I learned a few important tips when it comes to developing for AirConsole that were not clear to me this time around. First off, due to the nature of the controller being separated from the screen, there is naturally some lag time between the two. This can be very clearly felt if you go play the Racing Wars game on AirConsole now. When you try and turn around corners it sometimes feels like it is just not working. This can make creating realtime games more difficult on AirConsole. I tried to avoid this in the creation of Christmas Eve by making each action the user can take require some time to pass before performing another action. The players do not notice the lag as much anymore because they are forced to wait between actions. As long as you are aware of the lag, it can be easy to make sure you design your mechanics around it.

When playing games on mobile devices I often begin to realize how unsatisfying the emulated controllers are on the screen. Without the tactile feedback from physical buttons it is hard to make sure you are actually hitting the buttons you mean too. Both the iPhone 7 and the Steam Controller are trying to emulate this feeling through vibrations to make it feel more responsive. This problem can be multiplied with AirConsole if you are not careful because a lot of the time you are not looking at the phone while playing. Keeping the controller very simple is a simple way around this problem. Once the controller gets too complex, users will not be able to focus on the screen throughout the gameplay. I ran into this issue when developing Christmas Eve; I made the controller too complicated. It causes the players to be overwhelmed when you first start as well as not being able to focus on the screen since the controller has so much to take in.

This brings us to the most important tip I could give anyone developing for AirConsole: Be careful about how much the players are required to look between the screen and the controller. One of the major problems with the gameplay of Christmas Eve is that you must keep track of the item in your inventory (on your individual controller), the location of each player (on the screen) and what is being built at each station at any given time (on both the screen and controller). This leads to a lot of looking up and down that makes you waste a lot of time and confuses new players. Had I added the players inventories to the screen or somehow had a mini-map to show where everyone was, it would have at least partly solved this problem.