WeDraw - Multiplayer Drawing Game for the Family
My kids were obsessed with Speed Draw on Roblox. It's basically Pictionary -- you get a theme, everyone draws, then you vote on whose drawing is the best. Simple concept, endlessly entertaining for kids. Then Roblox bumped the age rating to 13+ because, well, people were drawing... let's just say inappropriate things. My kids are under 13, so overnight their favorite game was gone.
Cue the sad faces and the "but whyyyyy" chorus.
So I did what any reasonable developer-parent would do: I built them their own version.
WeDraw
WeDraw is the result -- a multiplayer drawing and voting game that runs entirely in the browser. Works on iPads, Android tablets, phones, desktops, whatever. You hop in, pick a name, and either quick-play into a public room or create a private room with a shareable code. Everyone gets the same theme, draws against the clock, then votes on each other's masterpieces (no voting for yourself, obviously). Stars get tallied, winner gets bragging rights.
It's pretty bare-bones by design. No accounts, no login, no social features. Just open the link and play. That's exactly what I wanted -- something my kids and their friends could jump into without any friction.
The Tech Journey
The git history on this one tells a fun story. I actually started building it in Unity with C# -- the idea was to do a WebGL build and maybe native apps later. That worked, sort of, but the WebGL export was clunky and fighting Unity's networking for a simple multiplayer web game felt like using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame.
So I scrapped the Unity approach and ported the whole thing to a proper web stack: SvelteKit on the frontend with Vite for the build tooling, and Express with raw WebSockets on the backend. Game state, themes, and room configs all live in SQLite. Claude helped with a lot of the translation from the Unity prototype into the web version, which saved a ton of time.
The drawing canvas supports layers, undo, a flood-fill tool, adjustable brush sizes, and a solid color palette. There's an admin panel for managing themes and game config, a gallery page that preserves submitted drawings across deploys, and even a graceful deploy system that drains active rooms before restarting the server so nobody loses their game mid-round.
What's Next (Maybe)
A few things bouncing around in my head for future updates:
- Content moderation -- Run submitted drawings through an AI/LLM model to flag explicit content and auto-ban offenders. Right now it's basically just my kids and their friends using it, so it's not urgent, but if it ever gets wider use this would be important.
- Apple TV support -- Some kind of "spectator mode" or leaderboard display that you could throw up on the big screen while everyone draws on their own devices.
- Native apps -- The Capacitor scaffolding is already in the repo, so wrapping it into actual iOS/Android apps wouldn't be a huge lift. Would be cool to have it on the home screen as a real app instead of a bookmark.
No monetization plans -- this is purely a scratch-my-own-itch project. Built it for my kids, and it does exactly what I needed it to do.