Play it here: https://freeze-tag-online.aeveagg.workers.dev/

🎮 What This Actually Is

This is a real-time multiplayer freeze tag game that runs in your browser.

No installs, no accounts, no friction.
You send a link, people join, and it just works.

One player freezes.
Everyone else runs.

If you get frozen, your team has a few seconds to save you. If not, you switch sides.

Simple idea, but it gets out of hand very quickly.

🔥 Chaos in Action

(Drop a gif or short clip here of a round going completely wrong)

Ideally show:

• Someone getting frozen
• A teammate going for the save
• An ability triggering at the worst time
• Everyone panicking

That’s basically the whole game loop.

💀 What Went Wrong

A lot more than expected.

Movement felt off

At the start, what you saw wasn’t what others saw.

On your screen you’re safe.
On theirs, you’re already frozen.

Had to:

• Smooth positions instead of snapping
• Accept it won’t be perfect
• Focus on “feels right” instead of “is correct”

Lobbies were annoying

Making a lobby is easy.
Making it not break is not.

• People leaving mid-game
• Host disconnecting
• Games starting half empty
• Weird edge cases everywhere

Way more time went into this than I wanted.

Abilities broke everything

Blink, pulse, shuffle… all fun, all a nightmare.

• People teleporting into bad positions
• Freeze and save happening at the same time
• Entire lobby triggering abilities at once

At some point I stopped trying to make it perfect and just let it be chaotic.

Latency exists (shock)

Even small delays mess things up:

• Tag detection
• Freeze timing
• Saves

So instead of fighting it fully:

• Added small buffers
• Made interactions slightly forgiving
• Prioritised responsiveness

Good enough > perfect

🛠️ Under the Hood

Cloudflare Workers

Backend runs on Cloudflare Workers.

No servers to manage, just deploy and it’s live everywhere.
Perfect for this kind of project.

Real-time stuff

Using WebSockets to keep everything in sync.

Each player:

• Sends movement + actions
• Receives updates from everyone else
• Listens for events (freeze, save, abilities)

No polling, everything is pushed instantly.

State syncing (the painful part)

Kept it simple:

• Server is the source of truth
• Clients send inputs
• Server processes and broadcasts

On the client:

• Smooth movement with interpolation
• Ignore tiny inconsistencies
• Make it look good rather than mathematically correct

Trying to perfectly sync everything just made it worse.

🔍 TLDR

• Multiplayer freeze tag in the browser
• No downloads, just send a link
• Chaos comes from abilities + real players
• Multiplayer is way harder than it looks
• “Good enough” ended up being the best approach

🤔 What’s Next

If I keep building this:

• Better mobile support
• More maps
• Cleaner networking
• Maybe some stats or progression

Right now it works, it’s fun, and it’s slightly broken in a good way.