Unprompted!

Inspiration

Everyone knows the game Telephone. A simple message passes from person to person until the final version has almost nothing to do with the original. Inspired by Gartic Phone, we thought: what if we handed the drawing over to AI and made the situation significantly worse?

That became Unprompted!, a party game where AI draws your (terrible) ideas, your friends misinterpret them, and those misinterpretations immediately become the next images. Now you can play Gartic Phone even if you suck at drawing.

How we built it

We built the interface with React and Vite and used Node.js and WebSockets to synchronize players, submissions, and rounds.

A separate Python service built with FastAPI handles image generation using PyTorch and Diffusers. Players can choose between Chroma Flash and SDXL-Turbo, running locally on our development computer. DINOv2 compares the generated images for scoring.

We also integrated Discord’s Embedded App SDK to let players access the game via a Discord voicecall.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was keeping the game moving while giving the AI enough room to be ridiculous. Long generation times can kill the momentum of a party game, but a fast image isn’t much help if it turns an absurd prompt into something ordinary.

Model censorship added another consideration. We wanted harmless, surreal humor to survive the generation process without being unnecessarily rejected or toned down. Exaggeration, bizarre situations, and unexpected combinations are central to the game. If a model removes the strangest details, it can also remove the punchline. At the same time, a model misunderstanding a prompt can look like censorship, so we had to consider both content restrictions and how well it followed unusual instructions.

We experimented with different models, generation settings, and creativity controls to balance speed, recognizable details, and creative freedom. The challenge was finding a setup that could keep up with a room full of players while preserving the weirdness they brought to it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a complete multiplayer experience and it's really fun to play!

In local testing, SDXL-Turbo generated an image in roughly half a second once loaded. We also reduced Chroma’s allocated GPU memory from approximately 29.5 GB to 14 GB using INT8 quantization.

What's next for Unprompted!

We plan to deploy it so it can be played via web and Discord integration.

Built With

• discord
• fastapi
• llm
• local
• node.js
• python
• react
• stable-diffusion
• vite
• websockets