In just a couple of weeks popular YouTuber Jacksfilms, in collaboration with Galvanic Games, will be releasing a brand new comedy game across iOS, Android, and Steam. The game is called Be Funny Now! and it’s a competitive party game that tasks you with, well, being funny… now! It is based on Jack’s long-running Yesterday I Asked You segments, or YIAY, and specifically on the live gameshow-ified version that he would run on Twitch called, naturally, YIAY Live. It involved posing a prompt to viewers who would provide an answer, and then the audience would vote on whose answer they thought was the funniest one.
Jack noticed that even after his YIAY Live broadcasts went offline that people were continuing to play in the chat by hosting their own games by asking questions and voting for the funniest answers. It gave Jack the idea that hey, YIAY Live doesn’t NEED a live host per se, and that this was a game that people were actively wanting to play and enjoy with others. Hence Be Funny Now! was born.
Well, it wasn’t like born right away. This all began 4 years ago back in 2018. Be Funny Now! features competitive play for up to 8 players, where everyone will begin by voting on a prompt and then after everyone gives their answer the other players can all vote for which answer was the funniest. Or the not-funniest. Yes, you can essentially be publicly shamed for your unfunny answers by being pelted with virtual tomatoes. There are more than 600 prompts in the form of questions or drawing prompts, and these are a mixture of ones previously used on YIAY Live and brand new ones.
What’s really neat is that you can jump right into a Public Lobby to start up a game with random players, or you can create a private game for just you and your friends. Or even better, if you have some friends you want to play with but don’t quite have 8 players, you can join up with however many friends you do have and then hop into public games together, sort of like couch co-op mode.
Also, if you’re not in the mood to play a whole multiplayer round, there’s a Daily Question mode which features a new prompt or question each day. You submit an answer and then you’re shown a couple of options from other people’s answers, and you’ll pick the one you think is the funnier of the two. Meanwhile everyone else is doing the same thing, and at the end of the day all the votes are tallied up and there is an ultimate winner who will earn some in-game goodies. It’s kind of like a giant Battle Royale. You can see Jack explain many more details about the game, and answer loads of questions from Twitter, in the following video.
Speaking of in-game goodies, Be Funny Now! features a ton of different cosmetic items to outfit your avatar with. You’ll earn the in-game currency by doing well and, of course, you’ll be able to purchase it with real money through IAP. However, there’s nothing available to buy that will give you any sort of competitive advantage, it was very important to Jack and company from the beginning that there was no pay to win element to the game. The mobile versions will contain ads, but only after an entire game has been completed, and a full game is expected to take around 15-20 minutes.
I really like the idea of Be Funny Now! but a game like this will live or die on having a strong user base. Being free is always key to ensuring a lot of people will be willing to download your game. It’ll also feature cross-platform play between the iOS, Android, and Steam versions, so that should hopefully mean there’s a lot of people potentially playing at any given time. I’ll definitely be looking forward to giving Be Funny Now! a shot when it launches two weeks from today on May 17th.
