SketchDuel

Title
Community Canvas
Game Lobby
Draw something with players

Inspiration

I wanted to bring the classic party game experience of Pictionary to Meta Horizon, creating a social experience where players can connect through creativity and laughter. Drawing games are universally accessible and is the perfect canvas for bringing people together.

What it does

SketchDuel is a real-time multiplayer drawing and guessing game for Meta Horizon Worlds. Players take turns drawing randomly selected words on a digital canvas while others race to guess correctly. Features include 8-player lobbies with Bots, global leaderboards, a community gallery of featured drawings, progressive avatar unlocks, 12 animated emote reactions, and tiered word difficulty with score multipliers.

How we built it

We built SketchDuel using TypeScript and NoesisUI's XAML framework. I developed a open source turn based library as part of this submission (https://github.com/suppers-ai/turbo) to help me in future games and help others. Our hybrid server-client architecture runs a single codebase across all clients with automatic server detection. The 20x20 drawing grid uses batch optimization (50ms intervals) to reduce network traffic, and we implemented compact data serialization for drawings and game state.

Challenges we ran into

Creating personality-driven AI bots that feel like real players required designing unique drawing templates, word associations, and context-aware commentary systems. Optimizing for VR's element limits meant implementing pagination and careful payload management.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our 4 AI personalities (Bolt, ChillBot, MalFunction, Slimy) each have distinct drawing styles, guess accuracy, and personality traits with 100+ pixel-art templates. The responsive UI seamlessly adapts across mobile, VR, and desktop.

What we learned

Building with Noesis, and the restrictions in Meta Horizon toke some aggressive optimization—batch updates, compact formats, and element pagination are essential, and some creative thinking — command parameters are not available so used a 20 x 20 button layout.

What's next

Game - A lot can be extended! Custom words, tournament modes, additional avatar collections, and expanded bot personalities. Build this out to also allow VR users to play (Add a 3d mode). I would also like to build multiple 2d games and have a common shared space where people can meet and go to the different games, and have them all connected via some unlocks.

Tools - Along with Turbo (https://github.com/suppers-ai/turbo) I would also like to create tools and template libraries of common pages/screens/code to help speed up development for myself and others. For example an adapter between HTML and XAML, a library of common leaderboards, lobbies etc. Could also develop a MCP Server to help develop Noesis templates and Typescript code more accurately.

Events - Hold regular events to get people engaged and letting everything show off their drawing skills!