Overview

aMuse Us is a social multiplayer game where you and your friends (or strangers!) try to catch the AI amongst you. Using anonymous responses, group conversations, and pair challenges, uncover the truths about each other. Using Meta's Muse, this game helps break the ice by using a game of suspicion to get to know who the people really are behind their codenames.

Inspiration

We wanted to create an engaging ice-breaker. This game gives everyone a talking point by making them try to guess who the AI is. The main concept was to create a social deduction game where your answers may give you away. The aim is to try not to be too generic as this will make you the most suspicious.

What it does

aMuse Us is a game where you have to guess if you can spot the AI.

Players enter a room with a short pin and are given a random codename. Players will go through 3 rounds of getting increasingly personal questions, having a discussion and then voting for who they think the AI is.

How we made it

We created aMuse Us using React and TypeScript. The game was themed around a pixel arcade. We wanted to make it easy to get into a game so we made it so players could enter a game using their phone by entering a pin. The game has cool animations with floating clouds, glowing borders and a dark theme with a sunrise theme.

The backend ensures everyone in the same room progresses through the game at the same time. It also provides Muse (our hidden AI) with the context it requires.

The aim of Muse was to blend in. Muse has been designed to pick up on the tone of the group, whether they are being very brief in their answers, joking or taking the questions seriously. It will adapt its answers to fit in. As the questions get more personal it must remain consistent whilst adapting to the new questions.

Challenges

Timing was more challenging than anticipated. We had to ensure players had enough time to think and discuss but if they had to wait too long the game lost its flow. We had to ensure each section was clear.

Balancing Muse was another challenge. If Muse was too polished in its answers it would give itself away. However if we made all of Muse’s answers strange it would be obvious. The interesting part was creating the little flaws to make the conversation feel realistic.

Using a .tech domain for aMuse Us proved to be a bit more challenging. Everything worked on localhost but when we hosted it things didn’t run the same. We had some issues with the deployment but eventually got it working online.

Achievements

We are very proud of our interface. We created a custom pixel arcade style with floating clouds, moving stars, bold fonts and glass panels. We had to do a lot of trial and error to get everything looking good but the game has a fun look and everything is consistent. We loved the dark theme and sunrise theme.

We are proud of how much effort we put into creating a realistic Muse. We focused on the answers, Muse picking up on the tone of the group and keeping consistent throughout the personal questions. It was interesting to find the balance between Muse being too polished. We wanted players to question their gut feeling and sometimes feel more suspicious of each other than the AI.