Writing Party Games with Chromecast

The Chromecast, an underpowered computer running the Chrome browser, is often underutilized as a gaming device. This talk will teach you to write a party game, leveraging your guests’ phones as game controllers and your TV as a game board, using only the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. No app required.

Handout

This talk presented a Chromecast game based on word origins — the source of this application is in two parts.

  1. A Rails app which served the front-end and handled storing game data.

  2. A Node.js app which used Hapi and Nes to handle maintaining open websockets with clients and relaying messages from the Rails app.

The slides are also available, should you find them useful!

Getting Started

The best way to get started in my opinion is to follow the official Getting Started guides, specifically the Custom Receiver guide.

Don’t forget to register your account, devices, and applications in the Google Cast SDK Developer Console early!

Thanks for listening!

Slides

Talk history

  • Kansas City Developer Conference in Kansas City, MO