Buzz Trivia Game

• 

  Buzz Host

• 

  Buzz Player

• 

  Buzz Select

Inspiration

I wanted to recreate the fast-paced experience of live, college-style trivia competitions where players compete to buzz in first. Most trivia apps are single-player or turn-based, so I wanted to build something that actually felt real-time and competitive across multiple devices.

What it does

Buzz is a real-time multiplayer trivia buzzer game where a host controls the game flow, questions, and scoring, while players join from separate devices and compete to buzz in first. The system synchronizes buzz order and scores instantly across all connected clients.

How I built it

I built the frontend using React, creating separate interfaces for the host and players. The backend synchronization is powered by Supabase Realtime, which allows all clients to stay in sync through live event updates.

The system tracks players, buzz order, scores, and game progression in shared state, ensuring that all users see consistent updates in real time.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was handling real-time interactions correctly. When multiple players buzz at nearly the same time, the system must determine a consistent and fair order across all devices. Additionally, if the host displays a new question, it must sync with the other players.

This required thinking about race conditions and ensuring that updates from Supabase were processed in a way that preserved correct ordering and avoided conflicts between clients.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm most proud of getting real-time multiplayer synchronization working smoothly across multiple devices. The fact that players can join from different tabs/devices and see consistent buzz order and scoring in real time makes the experience feel like a live game.

What I learned

Through this project, I learned how to design and implement real-time systems, work with event-based architectures. I also gained experience structuring a React app with multiple roles (host vs player) and shared state.

What's next for Buzz Trivia Game

In the future, I would add features like custom question sets, user authentication, persistent game history, and improved UI/UX. I would also explore scaling the real-time system to support larger games with more players and potentially lobbies with difficulty per lobby.

Built With

• html
• javascript
• react
• supabase-realtime
• vercel
• vscode