What it is

Everyone stands on a round tiled platform over water. You shove each other off. The floor drops away in rings on a fixed schedule, so the space you are fighting over keeps shrinking. Last one standing takes the round; first to three takes the match.

One to four people on one screen — the first game here for more than two.

One verb

There is no jump, no attack button and no dash. There is the shove: a short lunge that hits whatever it meets. Everything else in the game comes out of that one move meeting a shrinking floor.

That is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature. Four controls per person does not fit a shared touchscreen, and a shared touchscreen is the whole point.

Distances are tuned so position matters: from the starting spot, one plain shove will not put you out and two will. A heavy one will.

The orb

One power-up, and you can see it coming. Its landing spot is marked well before it arrives, so everybody knows where it will be before anybody can take it — which turns it into a decision rather than a lucky pickup.

Take it and your next connecting shove is a heavy one. A miss keeps it, a hit spends it, and falling in loses it. Only one is ever out at a time.

How to play

Take a cornerTouch it
MovePush with your thumb
ShoveTap with your other hand

Each corner is a thumb stick that appears where your thumb lands. An untouched seat goes back to the computer after a few seconds, so a game never stalls because somebody walked away.

On a desktop, two people can share the keyboard: W A S D to move and Space to shove, or the arrow keys and Enter. The corners name the keys on screen when a mouse is detected. Gamepads join with any button, and any seat nobody takes is played by the computer.

Falling in is not the end of the round

Fighters who go in swim about in the water and can still be steered. It changes nothing and wins nothing. It is there because sitting out a round should still be something to do.

What isn't settled yet

Whether four people will physically crowd one screen. Two at either end of a tablet is proven; four around one is a different proposition and only the tablet-on-a-table case has really been thought through.

With four players, first to three can run to nine rounds. That is a property of the format rather than a fault, but whether it is too long for a room where people are waiting is untested.

Credits and licences

No third-party engine — it draws to a plain canvas. The typefaces it does use are embedded under the SIL Open Font Licence, with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Cover art was rendered from the game’s own drawing code.

Standing Room is original work by Launchway Games.