Design and development of a local multiplayer music party game

Abstract

It is a common situation that a group of friends meets at someone’s house. Maybe for dinner, to watch a movie or for just having coffee. It is also common that sometimes someone brings the idea of playing a game, this kind of games, called party games, are mostly designed to be playable for a fixed quantity range of people and here is the trouble. Some people often have to pair for playing like one, or even worse, some of them are left out of the game making uncomfortable the people who got to play. This issue has never really being addressed by the board gaming industry because it is very difficult to design a consistent game experience for any number of players. Video games, on the other hand, benefit from the number of players in many ways. It is a fact that a well designed multiplayer video game becomes more fun as more players join the game as the interactions of the players are more unpredictable than the possible pre-programmed ones by the game developers. The only obstacle that party video game industry has not addressed at all is to give the potential players the possibility of playing by having to have enough gamepads for every player and of course the cost that this issue implies. Music-party Hero is an experimental project that tries to address this problem by making use of one piece of high technology everyone almost everytime always carries around, his/her smartphone. By using it as a game controller and a PC/console/Smart TV as the main machine that executes the game on a big screen, it is possible to connect them via WiFi connection and have almost any number of people get together to play the same game at the same time.