game-launcher-web

The TV/screen app for Space Console — a web-based, AirConsole-style party-game launcher for 10-foot UIs (webOS, Android TV, tvOS) and desktop browsers. The TV shows the menu and runs the games; phones are the controllers (see the game-controller repo).

The launcher:

• shows a game menu (category rails, filter chips, thumbnails) and launches a game into a persistent iframe shell, so the WebRTC links survive switching between games;
• pairs with phones over WebRTC, brokered by the web-api signaling service — it shows a scan-to-join QR / room code, then relays each controller's input into the running game;
• keeps an AirConsole-style player roster (seats, names, a lead crown);
• fires fire-and-forget stats beacons to web-api as games are played.

Zero-build, zero-backend static site — plain ES modules, no bundler, no framework. Open index.html and it runs.

npm install     # dev tooling only
npm run dev     # http://localhost:5173 (auto-reload)

For real phones the launcher, the controller and the signaling socket must share one origin (iOS Safari only lets page JS reach the host:port it loaded from). The web-api repo serves all of them together — see its README for single-origin local dev and the one-service Render deploy.

How input reaches a game

The launcher speaks one intent vocabulary (up/down/left/right/enter/back) across keyboard, TV remote, gamepad, and relayed phone controllers. The running game lives in the iframe shell; the two exchange postMessage:

Direction	Message	Meaning
shell → game	sc:intent {intent, player}	a button press, tagged with the sender's seat
shell → game	sc:analog {steer, throttle, brake, handbrake, player}	a continuous driving frame (steering games)
shell → game	sc:players {players}	the current roster
game → shell	sc:controls {profile, buttons}	the phone pad the game wants (dpad / buttons / analog + aux)
game → shell	sc:gameover {kind, …}	a score / 2-player result for the stats store
game → shell	sc:back	exit to the menu

Documentation

All docs live in the wiki repo (the org-wide hub), not here:

• Service docs: wiki/docs/services/game-launcher-web/
• How we build, deploy, and review across repos: wiki/docs/way-of-working.md

Published site (per branch): main deploys to the Pages root; feature branches get a preview at /preview/<branch-slug>-<hash>/. Scripts are cache-busted at deploy time (npm run build → _dist/); local npm run dev stays build-free.