Case study · Game design & creative direction
Alibi
A handmade party game where your friends are the trivia.
A party game for friends in the same room. One person gets a question about themselves and answers honestly. Everyone else writes a fake answer that sounds like something that person would say. Then you all vote on which one is real. Points for guessing right, more for fooling people. Everyone plays on their own phone, and a laptop or TV runs the game for the group. I designed it and built it with GPT’s help.
- Game design
- Art direction
- Original music
- Real-time multiplayer
- Role
- Design and build
- Status
- Live
- Players
- 2 to 8, phones plus one shared screen
- Play at
- alib.app (opens in a new tab)
Your phone shows the things only you should see: your answer, your secret role, and in the drawing round, whether you’re the one who got told the truth. The TV shows the things everyone should see: the question, who’s still typing, and the results at the end of each turn. Most of the work went into keeping those two straight.
See a game play out
The video’s opening frame: four doodle characters sit on a green couch holding phones, facing a TV showing the character picker with Frog, Cowboy, Flower, and Cape all checked off, under the handwritten line “Game night starts here.”
How it works
The server runs everything: whose turn it is, what phase you are in, who can vote, and the score. Your phone sends what you did and gets back a screen. It only receives what you are allowed to know, so if you are not supposed to have the answer, it never reaches your phone at all. Drop off and come back and you get your seat and your answer again.
There is no voice chat and no moderation tooling, and characters are doodles you build rather than photos. It can use AI to write filler answers, but that is optional and it is switched off on the live version.
Where it is at
It is live at alib.app. I tested it by starting a game, joining from separate browsers, and playing the whole way through: writing, voting, the reveal, the drawing round, pausing, and dropping off and reconnecting. It all held up.
What I have not done is sit a group of friends down and play it properly. The tests pass, which is not the same thing.
Your friends are the trivia. The rest is up for debate.
The video is an animated example rather than a recording of a real game, and I made it before changing the timers. The 2 to 8 players is how many can play, not how many have.