Web Dev Challenge
The Challenge
Build a game that's played on at least 2 devices.
Single player, multiplayer, cooperative, competitive, or something totally different — your challenge is to come up with something fun that is played across at least two devices. Temporal's state tracking and Workflow message passing features tools will allow you to manage sending information between devices dependably.
Your game could be something like Jackbox, where a TV is the "game board" and each player's phone is how they interact with it on their turn. You could make a game that uses phone APIs like the camera or gyroscope. Or you can implement a simple word game like the New York Times connection puzzles, but with the twist that it's designed to be solved collaboratively, and a session can persist beyond the players closing the web app.
The prompt is here to create constraints and give us a general theme. Creative (mis)interpretations of the prompt are not only allowed — they’re actively encouraged!
We’re trying to have fun, make each other laugh, learn something new, and get people stoked to build on the web. The more fun you’re having, the better the show will be.
The best case for all of us is to approach this as a playful opportunity to build something we enjoy, whether it’s cool, clever, useful, or an intentional trolling effort.
Previous Web Dev Challenge Episodes
The Tool: Temporal
Your app must use Temporal as part of the build. Temporal provides SDKs for Go, TypeScript, Python, .NET (C#), Java, and PHP, so you can use the language of your choice.
If you're using TypeScript (since this is the Web Dev Challenge, after all), you can create a new project using npx:
npx @temporalio/create@latest ./my-app
You can also add the Temporal TypeScript SDK to an existing project with npm:
npm install @temporalio/client @temporalio/worker @temporalio/workflow @temporalio/activity
Temporal is a durable execution platform, which means you can orchestrate complex logic across multiple services in a way that’s resilient and flexible. The getting started docs are a great way to get familiar with what Temporal is and how you can use it in this challenge. I'd also recommend looking at the Message Passing documentation, or taking Temporal's Interacting with Workflows course, to understand how to send input back and forth from running Workflows. You can also look at Temporal’s new Code Exchange for examples of community-created projects -- we even have a community-contributed React template. Finally, if you want to see an example of a (real-time!) game that was created using Temporal, take a look at the keynote demo from the 2024 Replay Conference, which uses Svelte.