Family Room — Game Dev Kit

Everything you need to build and test games for Family Room, entirely in the browser — no iOS app source and no native toolchain required. This directory is self-contained and publishable on its own (e.g. as its own GitHub repo or a GitHub Pages site).

Family Room is a local, serverless, peer-to-peer party-game shell: friends in the same room each open the app on their phone, one hosts, the rest join, and everyone plays a shared game. A game is just a bundle of HTML + JS + assets written against one injected global, Table. The same bundle runs on every device; the host is authoritative.

What's in here


GAME-AUTHORING.md	The complete author's guide — bundle/archive format, the full `Table` SDK, assets, a copy-paste starter game, and the rules every game must follow. Start here (and hand this to an LLM writing a game).
skills/game-dev/	A Claude Code skill for game development — drop it into a project's `.claude/skills/` and Claude follows the canonical dev/test/version/ship workflow and UX standards automatically.
FR-GAME.md	The `FR` game-structure library — seeded RNG, decks, seats and elimination, standings, timers, and a host reducer that refuses illegal intents. Written for a small model: cheat sheet, per-primitive rules, and a complete 40-line game to copy.
sdk/	The runtimes both harnesses inject: `table-sdk.js` (the ONE `Table` implementation, shared with the iOS shell), `fr-feel.js` (animations/haptics/sound), `fr-game.js` (structure).
harness/	Run real bundles headless — N virtual phones, a virtual clock (including `Date`), bots. `playtest.mjs` fuzzes each game across seeds, table sizes, hostile input, mid-game disconnects and mid-game pauses, and checks: it never throws, always terminates, ends exactly once, leaks no timers, a refused intent changes nothing, and the same seed replays move for move.
validate.mjs	Check a bundle (folder or `.zip`) before it goes near a phone: manifest schema, offline-only, no external hosts, viewport, size.
playtest/	The Playtest Studio — a zero-dependency web tool that runs your game across multiple simulated players in iPhone-sized frames, with a wire-message log, disconnect testing, hot reload, and one-click Export .zip.

The one command

node check.mjs

Conformance + the FR library suite + bundle validation + a headless bot playtest of every bundle. Node only — no browser, no simulator, no Mac. If this is green, the only thing left that a Mac can tell you is how the game feels.

Quick start

# serve the dev-kit ROOT, not playtest/ — the studio loads sdk/fr-feel.js
python3 -m http.server 8777
# open http://localhost:8777/playtest/   (localhost is required for the folder picker)

Serving playtest/ directly still works, but the studio can't reach sdk/fr-feel.js from there, so games lose Table.feel() and the shared fr-* animations. The console says so if it happens.

Then: pick a built-in Sample to see a game run, read GAME-AUTHORING.md, write your own game folder (manifest.json + index.html + game.js), Open game folder… to load it, play it across players, and Export .zip when it's ready.

Publishing / hosting

The whole kit is static files. Host playtest/ on GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, or any static server (it needs https/localhost for the folder picker). To ship a finished game to players, export its .zip and load it into the Family Room app via Add Game from Zip; joiners who don't have it pull it from the host over the air.

The native shell that runs these bundles on-device (Swift/SwiftUI, Network.framework peer-to-peer) lives in the main Family Room app repository; you don't need it to author or test games.

Rendered from tools/README.md in the dev kit. Read it on GitHub.