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Ok Name One

A Jackbox-style party game about making lists.

Play it live →

OkNameOne is a browser-based party game in the spirit of Jackbox: one shared screen (the TV or laptop), and everyone else joins from their phone with a room code.

What makes it interesting

The whole experience is realtime — players join, submit answers, and watch results update live and in sync. That means persistent, bidirectional connections between every player and the game room.

Architecture notes

This is intentionally a separate repo and deployment from this website — its needs are different enough that isolating it keeps the static site cheap and safe:

  • Realtime layer lives on a purpose-built service (e.g. PartyKit), not on short-lived serverless functions, which can't hold WebSocket connections.
  • Game/room state is kept in fast, ephemeral storage; durable data in a small Postgres.
  • The Next.js UI can still deploy on Vercel and link back from /projects/oknameone here.

The internals are designed in the OkNameOne repo; this page is the case study.