Sidequest

Shared challenges that turn a night with friends into a game.

Explore the project

Designed & built by BuiltBy2

Shared game rooms
Live challenges & results
Website & mobile apps

The project

What we set out to build

Sidequest is a mobile party game in which friends join a room, receive private challenges and work out who did what. We built the game rules, native apps, website and game service together. The main engineering problem was keeping a shared game fair and recoverable when players leave the app or return at different times.

01 / Foundations

Challenge assignment and scoring

We shaped the experience around joining a room, adding or choosing challenges, and starting together. The rules needed to cover individual tasks, paired tasks and secret missions without revealing another player's private information. A challenge cannot go back to its author, paired tasks must name the right partner, and finishing a task does not award points by itself. Recognition and confirmation happen in the recap, so the interface and the scoring model had to be designed together.

See how it worksRecorded from the product

Paired challenge walkthrough

A Sidequest room with fictional players preparing a custom round. — Custom game lobbyMobile

Sidequest's final scores for a fictional demo game. — Game resultsMobile

02 / Implementation

Keeping the game running between visits

The TypeScript game service owns the clock, assignments and scores; phones display the current state rather than deciding the next round locally. The hosted version combines PostgreSQL storage with durable scheduled workflows, so play does not depend on somebody keeping the app open. We built recovery for returning players and repeated requests, including saved recap drafts and scores that cannot be awarded twice. Notifications remain optional, and refusing permission never blocks entry into the game.

Sidequest's public website introducing the party game. — The Sidequest websiteWebsite

03 / Refinement

Multiplayer testing and mobile refinement

The work extended beyond individual screens to full multiplayer sessions: small challenge pools, paired assignments, early finishes, missed answers, pause and resume, and the final score reveal. Automated checks exercise those rules alongside mobile interactions. Later passes reduced repeated database reads and unnecessary unchanged-state traffic, while preserving private player views. Android also needed attention to keyboard and navigation behaviour, plus saving personal cards to the gallery without asking for broad access to a player's photographs.

Where it is now

The website and game service are live, and the Android app is available in the UK. The iOS version is in TestFlight. The same room and scoring system supports both native platforms and the invited browser experience.