PB
Problem
Name-Place-Animal-Thing is a great game. Someone calls a letter and everyone races to fill in a name, a place, an animal, and a thing before time runs out. On paper it’s stuck: somebody has to be the referee, call the letter, watch the clock, and then settle the scoring arguments by hand. It’s fast and social right up until the admin gets in the way.
Why I built it
I wanted to keep everything that makes NPAT fun (the speed, the bluffing, the “is that even a real animal?” arguments) and hand the boring parts to the phone. If the letter, the timer, and the scoring just happen, everyone gets to stay in the game instead of running it.
What it is
A native mobile game for iOS and Android. Play solo against ghost bots, or open a live room and play with friends in real time. A round drops a letter, the clock starts, and you fill your categories before time’s up. Rarer answers score more, so the game rewards thinking past the obvious.
Solo and multiplayer
Single-player is an instant round against bots, with configurable categories, rounds, and difficulty, good for a quick game on your own. Multiplayer runs real-time rooms where everyone plays the same letter at once, then answers go to a fast peer vote so the group decides what counts, with no dictionary arguments. Achievements, XP, level-ups, and daily challenges give it a reason to come back.
Engineering decisions
One React Native (Expo) codebase ships to both stores. Multiplayer is server-authoritative: a Node, Express, and Socket.io backend owns the round deadline, the scoring, and host migration, so one slow phone can’t stall a room and no client can fake a score. Letters are drawn with a weighted random that favours letters you can actually build words from. That small detail decides whether a round feels fair.
What shipped
A polished, live word game on both app stores: solo-with-bots and real-time multiplayer, peer-voted scoring, achievements and XP progression, and daily challenges. A recent update added ghost bots, level-ups, and a lot more reveal-moment juice and haptics.
What I learned
The hard part of a casual game isn’t the rules. It’s protecting the feel. Keeping a round fast and frictionless mattered far more than piling on features; most of the work went into pace, fairness, and the small moments of feedback that make a round land.
