'Protostellar: Impact' Launches as Gaming Couch's First Third-Party Game
· Gaming Couch
There's a new game on Gaming Couch, and it marks a first for the platform. Protostellar: Impact is the first third-party game ever launched on GamingCouch.com, built by Jens and Katja of GameLoom Studio. You play a small asteroid with a big appetite, and the plan is simple: eat, grow, and stay far away from anything bigger than you.
Start Small, Eat Everything
You begin as a little asteroid drifting through space. Consume smaller planetary bodies and you grow, and the bigger you get, the bigger the targets you can go after. But space doesn't make it easy. Gravity is constantly tugging you off course, so every approach becomes a small fight between where you want to go and where physics wants to take you.
And then there are the big planets. They sit at the top of the food chain, and you are not ready for them. Keep your distance, pick targets your own size (or preferably smaller), and work your way up. Fight gravity, find your targets, grow. That's the loop, and it's a satisfying one.
From a Seven-Day Game Jam to Your Living Room
Protostellar: Impact started life back in 2023 as a game jam project, built in just seven days. Inspired by a mixture of agar.io and Spore's first phase, set in a casual space theme. The core idea was to start tiny, eat what you can, and dodge what you can't.
Later Jens and Katja adapted it to Gaming Couch using the JavaScript-based developer tools our platform provides, turning a jam project into a full couch game you can play on your TV with your phone as the controller.
C++ in Your Browser? Yes, Really
Here's the part that made the developers among us lean in. Over in the Gaming Couch Discord, Jens told us that Protostellar: Impact is actually written in C++ and compiled to the web with Emscripten, the toolchain that turns native code into something a browser can run. The Gaming Couch developer tools are JavaScript-based (with support for Unity as well!), so the C++ game core and the JS integration layer work together to bring the whole thing to the platform. A really interesting stack overall, and proof that you don't have to build in JavaScript to ship on Gaming Couch.
We're planning a follow-up interview with GameLoom Studio to dive deeper into what the development and the Gaming Couch integration were actually like, so stay tuned for that one.
The First of Many
This launch means a lot to us. Protostellar: Impact is the proof that our developer tools do what they were built for: letting outside creators bring their games to the couch. If you've got a party game idea of your own, join the developer waitlist and come hang out in our Discord, where conversations like the one above happen all the time.
And if you'd rather do the eating than the building, grab your friends, start playing, and remember: stay away from the bigger planets.