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LIVE Shows:

Tue, Sep 29 | 6pm ET (Watch recording)

Thu, Oct 1 | 8pm ET (Watch recording)

Thu, Oct 8 | 9pm ET (Watch recording)

Sun, Oct 11 | 9pm ET --> Coming up next!

Inspiration

We loved HQ Trivia back when that was a thing. A real host, a set time, and the whole country playing at the same time.

We combined that live interactivity with gameplay mechanics from the TV show Family Feud, where many answers can be right at once. This actually makes the game a lot more forgiving than HQ Trivia was, and arguably more fun for 'lower-skilled' players, like my grandma.

What it does

The Crowd is a live game show on your phone. Every show, our host Martha goes live and reads out questions we've already asked a crowd of real people. You have 30 seconds to guess what they said, and the more popular your answer, the more points you get. After 8 questions, whoever has the highest score wins a small cash prize. And if we win a Shipaton prize, we'll make sure to give back to the community ;)

We currently aim to go live twice a week, but hope to go live more often as the app grows.

How we built it

We first defined the live show format in Figma. Once we had something that felt right, we quickly prototyped it in Claude to turn the concept into a playable prototype. This let us iterate very quickly on difficulty, pacing, and overall gameplay feel by actually playing through different variations before writing any production code. Once we were happy with the overall experience, we built the real thing. Which now includes a full admin dashboard, studio production setup, and of course the app itself.

Challenges we ran into

So many haha, but by far the toughest one was the balancing difficulty. We have plenty of game design experience on the team, but getting the difficulty right was still a challenge because there are so many variables to balance. It starts with the questions themselves, but also includes time per question, how many answers players need to provide, and how forgiving we are with acceptable answers. If someone answers "Sandwich," should "Bread" count as correct? Well... that depends on the question and its context... And what about "Breads"...? 🫠 And throughout all of this, we had to make sure that high-skilled players would be engaged without simultaneously making the game too difficult for someone like my grandma to keep up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From the outside, it looks pretty simple: a host asks a question, you type, result is shown. But behind that is a pretty complex architecture with live production, latency, syncing everyone up, massive multiplayer architecture, etc. We're proud that you don't really notice any of it.

What we learned

Simpler is better. Every extra rule or new feature is one more thing to learn, and that adds friction. So we'd rather cut features, keep only what really matters (the core gameplay loop), and polish that rigorously.

What's next for The Crowd

Running more frequent shows is the top priority. We also want to make playing with friends in the same room as you more fun. So a big part of our strategy is currently focused on those things.