What we learned building a phone controller party game in Unity WebGL, Alpha now on itch

[u/DrLobaLobaa]

Hi all,

We finally have an alpha of our Jackbox-like party game To Be Frank up on itch. It runs in a browser on one screen and each player joins on their own phone, so there is nothing to install, no accounts and no app. It is free and nothing is being sold:

https://johnwilliams-12.itch.io/to-be-frank

Most of this post is about the build, because none of us had made a game before. I am a frontend developer who learned Unity on this project, one of us does backend, and the third is a product designer who also did the music and the 3d modelling. Everything about Unity and game development was new, so a lot of this took far longer than it would have with any prior experience.

The client is Unity WebGL talking to a socket server. Sockets were the first wall we hit, since the support and community packages we expected were not really there, so we ended up writing our own JSLib and handling the transport ourselves. After that came the parts that actually ate our months: host reconnect with score recovery, surviving a browser refresh in the middle of a game, and giving people clear feedback when a connection drops. Phones make that worse, because a browser that is idle or minimised will happily close the socket out from under you.

On the game itself, you score only on correctly guessing how many votes you got, most, some or least. Being the most voted player is worth nothing by itself. There is a Hot Seat round that puts one player in the spotlight, 3 to 8 players, about 15 minutes. Spectator mode and a Face off round between two players are planned, not built.

If it goes well we would like to put a fuller version on Steam later, and this version is not going anywhere either way.

The statements are our acknowledged weak point and our current focus, so that is the feedback I want most. Happy to answer anything about the WebGL and socket side.

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZjJbGtwNFI

[u/yo_bamma]

God bless you. I've worked on mobile Web games before and it's a nightmare. All the threads you find asking for advice, the advice is don't target mobile Web browsers. Congrats for getting it done!

[u/DrLobaLobaa → u/yo_bamma]

Thank you! It was indeed quite challenging!