You can play Vortelli’s Pizza on Poki!
The Making Of
I’ve always liked the idea of creating experiences for the web. Nowadays, 💪 almost every mobile and desktop device has a web browser and visitors can experience your creation without the friction of 💪 downloading and installing a separate app. Prior to creating Vortelli’s, I dabbled with tools like Three.js, Phaser and Construct, but 💪 I never actually completed a project. I kept falling into the cycle of starting a project with excitement and motivation 💪 but as I’d encounter problems, I’d gradually lose interest and eventually quit.
In mid-2024, I promised myself that I was going 💪 to break that cycle by finishing and releasing a 3D multiplayer web game. I still wasn’t proficient with any particular 💪 game engine and I spent many hours reading and watching YouTube videos trying to decide on the perfect engine. I 💪 eventually figured out that there was no such thing as a perfect engine and I really just needed to pick 💪 one, learn the basics and start building. I ended up choosing PlayCanvas because I was already pretty comfortable with JavaScript 💪 and I found its editor very simple to use.
I spent the majority of my time figuring out how to get 💪 the multiplayer netcode working. At first, the prototype game didn’t have any sort of goal or objective, it was just 💪 an open world where you could hang out with other players. Maybe it was because I’m a solo dev, but 💪 I started to feel that players would quickly become bored with this experience. Some kind of minigame needed to be 💪 added to give players a sense of purpose. I went with a pizza cooking minigame because everyone loves pizza, right? 💪 I chose the name ‘Vortelli’s Pizza,’ because it sounds like the name of a somewhat believable pizza shop and I 💪 couldn’t find any real life businesses on Google using that name already.
