Spider-Man Minecraft
My six year old wanted a game where Spider-Man builds things out of blocks. He asked for the last month. Most days more than once.
So it exists now. It runs in a browser, it costs nothing, and there's nothing to install. The working title is websling. The name everyone actually uses is Spider-Man Minecraft.
There's no login
No account, no password, no email address. That's the whole answer.
Open the link and press Play. The game asks what it should call you, you type something, and that name stays in your own browser. It never reaches me, because nothing here collects anything. Change it whenever you want to be somebody else.
Playing on your own
Press Play, type a name, press Let's play.
A card comes up with the controls on it. Press Space and it goes away. Sometimes you start in a bed, and Shift gets you out of it.
Playing together
One person makes the room. Everyone else opens a link.
- Press Play Together on the front screen.
- Press Play with friends. You land in a room of your own, with a six character code in the corner. Something like
dbe5uk. - Press Share. That copies the link. Send it to whoever you want in there.
Anyone who opens that link is standing in your world a few seconds later. If sending a link is awkward, read the code out loud instead. The other person presses Play Together, types it into Join a friend, and presses Go. Capitals don't matter, and pasting the whole link works too.
Eight people to a room. The world saves itself, so the tower you built together is still standing tomorrow if you come back to the same link.
Controls
| W A S D | Walk, or drive |
|---|---|
| Mouse | Look around. Click the game first so it captures the pointer |
| Space | Jump |
| E | Tap to fire a web bomb. Hold to swing |
| Q | Crawl up a wall |
| Left click | Break a block |
| Right click | Put a block down |
| 1 to 9, or the wheel | Pick which block you're holding |
| Tab | Open your things, or get into a car |
| Shift | Sneak, get out of a car, get out of bed |
| T | Chat |
| Esc | Pause |
There's a printable version of this inside the game, on the front screen, under Print controls.
Controllers work. Plug one in and it gets picked up, and the button prompts change to match whichever pad you're holding, so an Xbox player reads A and a PlayStation player reads Cross.
What you need
A laptop or a desktop, with a keyboard and a mouse. Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox all run it.
Phones and tablets don't. There's no touch scheme, so rather than let a kid flail at a screen that won't respond, the game says to go and find a laptop.
Things worth knowing
- Rooms are unlisted. Nothing anywhere lists them, and the only way in is a link somebody gave you. Anyone holding that link can walk in, so treat it like a house key.
- The game collects nothing. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking. There's a test that fails the build if that ever stops being true.
- Chat has a filter for rude words, and it starts switched off. Settings, then Comfort, then Hide rude words.
- Every world lives with its own room code, so a fresh link is a fresh world. Keep the link you like.
I've been writing about how this thing gets built, in Pelicans on Bicycles and a few other posts about the loop I run coding agents through.
He asked for web-swinging and he asked for a car. Hold E to swing. Press Tab to get in the car.