The Fateful Five

Overview

We showed up to Hack K-State 2024 with absolutely no idea what we wanted to make, other than wanting to use the 3D printer we brought with us. We ended up making a game loosely based on one of our favorite board games, Secret Hitler. Check out the demo!

As you can see, Clyde from Lucky Liars makes his return! There’s also Teddy K. the dog, Dr. Casa, and AJ Sampson, none of which are based on real people or anything

We used the 3D printer to make a custom controller for the game, which we called the Apparatus (unfortunately couldn’t be shown in the demo video). The game isn’t played with a mouse and keyboard; instead, you use this entirely 3D-printed Apparatus to cycle through options in the game. Press 1, 2, or 3 to select the corresponding policy and press 4 to discard it. Later, you can press a number to choose which of the four characters to eliminiate, which then turns off that LED on the controller for the rest of the game. There’s also a helpful display on the right!

Technical Details

It’s a browser-based JavaScript game built with Phaser.js and Vite that also has Auth0 login just to qualify for that prize lol. Assets were all made by hand and voice audio was generated with ElevenLabs using a distinct voice for each character.

But the more interesting part is the Apparatus. This used a Raspberry Pi Pico, an Adafruit 1.8” TFT display, and four buttons and LEDs. The goal was accessibility and simplicity, to make the whole game playable with four large easy-to-press buttons as a proof-of-concept for how games could be more accessible. Please check out the hardware README for more details!

Hack K-State 2024

We spent literally 24 hours trying to code this game in Rust using the Bevy game engine and got about 10% of the way there because Bevy is terrible. (sorry, it’s good at what it tries to do. unfortunately game dev in Rust is a joke.) After dinner on Saturday, we scrapped everything and restarted in JavaScript. Luckily we were able to reuse the assets and the hardware that our other two team members had made, but I spent 8 straight hours into the night writing like 900 lines of JavaScript to make this game work (I didn’t even use much AI either). Thankfully, the game logic was not too complex, it was just a lot of code, so we were able to get it done and hooked up to the Apparatus in time.

In the end, we won second place at the hackathon!

Here’s the devpost!

Repositories

Last updated on December 28, 2025.