Every project has to start somewhere, so here is the obligatory first post.
I built a Mafia game. If you have never played, it goes like this. A group sits in a circle, a few people are secretly the mafia, and everyone else is just a townsperson trying to survive. At night the mafia quietly pick someone off. During the day the whole town argues about who did it and votes someone to the gallows. Half the fun is lying to your friends with a straight face. The other half is watching someone get voted out and turn out to be completely innocent.
I grew up playing it with a worn out deck of cards and one friend who always wanted to be the narrator. I wanted that same feeling without the cards, without the setup, and without spending ten minutes explaining the rules every single time. So I made a version you can pull up on your phone. You start a game on a laptop or a TV, everyone else scans a code or types in six letters, and you are playing in under a minute. No app to install and no account to make.
This blog is where I am going to write about how it was built and why I made the calls I made. Some of it will be technical and some of it will just be me thinking out loud about game design. If you like reading about how small things get made, you are in the right place.
The next post gets into the actual guts of the game. The phone and TV setup, why there is no database anywhere, how the music works without a single audio file, and the fight I had with phones that refuse to play sound. If any of that sounds interesting, stick around.
And if you would rather just play, that button is right there.
Play a game