Pintar Party — Educational Party Games.

Description

Pintar Party (working title, code name PlayLearn) is an educational party-game platform for casual home use. The main screen — a TV or laptop — runs the game, and every player joins by scanning a QR code with their phone, which becomes their controller. No app install is needed.

Questions are part of the gameplay instead of a separate quiz: in Quiz Fighter, the first player to answer correctly picks an attack; in Brain Racers, question gates on the track give a boost or a slowdown; in Susun Kata, players arrange scrambled letters on their phone to form the answer.

Background

Most educational games are made for classrooms or for one child on one device. I wanted something families can play together in the living room, like a console party game, where learning happens because you want to win.

Goal

Build a platform where adding a new game does not require changing the lobby or the controller, and where game logic cannot be cheated from a phone.

Features

• Lobby in PlayStation 4 style: a row of game tiles, key art, QR code and room code, player list with leader and kick, team selection, and keyboard/remote navigation.
• One shape-shifting controller app: the server tells each phone which component to show — A/B/C buttons, joystick, scrambled letters, tilt, or pose.
• Games: Quiz Fighter (2 players), Brain Racers (4 players), Susun Kata crossword (4 players), and a motion-controlled runner based on Motion Runner .
• Question bank by subject and grade, with an admin page and JSON import/export.
• Parental settings: subjects, grade, parent PIN, and play limit.

Technologies

• TypeScript everywhere, organized as npm workspaces (server, host, controller, shared, games, questions, pose).
• Node.js + Express + Socket.IO for rooms and real-time events.
• Phaser 3 for the game scenes on the main screen.
• React for the phone controller, nipplejs for the joystick, and qrcode for joining.
• MediaPipe Pose Landmarker running in the phone’s browser (video never leaves the phone).
• SQLite (node:sqlite) for the question bank.

Technical Decisions

The server is authoritative: answers, “who was first”, scores, and damage are computed on the server using its own receive time, never trusted from the phone. Games declare what they need in a manifest (players, teams, controller type, questions), and the lobby and controller adapt to it.

Controllers send high-level actions like answer, lane, or jump rather than raw sensor data, so a game does not care whether input came from buttons, tilt, or the camera.

Notes

Work in progress. The source code is not public yet.