Hollow Alibi
A browser party game of selective evidence for 2–10 players, with built-in voice. Show a little truth, sell a bigger lie.
- 2–10players, or solo vs bots
- 90audio paths verified across 10 browsers
- 54engine and storage tests
The game
Your case is secretly full or empty. Make a claim, publish one real clue, defend your story over voice, then trust your assigned rival or call LIAR. Five rounds, explicit stakes, no elimination. Rooms join by a five-letter code from any phone or laptop, with solo practice against bots.
Engineering
- A 2–10 player game in TypeScript, React 19 and Cloudflare Workers, built around a server-authoritative state machine (5 phases, 5 rounds) that validates every action and computes all scores on the server.
- Hidden information stays private: each player gets a separate view built from server-only state, so opponents’ cases, decisions and server randomness never reach a client before the reveal. Bots play from the same restricted view.
- No lost or double-counted moves during simultaneous play: optimistic concurrency control (version-checked writes to Cloudflare D1/SQLite), idempotent action receipts and client-side rejection of stale snapshots.
- Opt-in WebRTC group voice with authenticated signaling, reconnect-safe session epochs and TURN relay fallback. An automated 10-browser test confirmed audio on all 90 directed paths, and a forced relay-only test confirmed audio in both directions.
- Account-free play secured with SHA-256-hashed session tokens in HTTP-only cookies, same-origin checks, request-size caps and per-session and per-IP rate limits. TURN credentials live in runtime secrets, never in client code.
- 3 bot difficulty levels, all rule-based; the Expert bot weighs public evidence, each opponent’s honesty history and expected value.
Process
- Redesigned the core loop after playtest feedback, replacing open-ended evidence reading with a claim-and-challenge system that gives every player a statement to defend and one named opponent to judge.
- 54 engine and storage tests, including all 8 payoff combinations, and Playwright end-to-end matches down to a 320 px screen. Fixed issues found in testing, including a timeout exploit that let players deny opponents’ points.
- Accessible dialogs, visible focus, reduced-motion support and mobile-first judgment screens.