The Story
My kids love Mad Libs. The problem with paper pads is you run out, and every app I found was either full of ads, didn't have stories my kids cared about, or charged a subscription for what is a very simple idea. So I built one.
Live
Rad Libs
The classic word game, rebuilt for family game night with a totally tubular late-80s aesthetic. Zero ads. Zero subscriptions. Maximum silliness.
Memphis design meets vaporwave — the main menu and story fill-in screens
Where We Are
It was supposed to be simple. Fill in the blanks, read the story, laugh. But the design kept escalating. By the third complete redesign -- this time a late-80s Memphis aesthetic with vaporwave colors -- it had become the most visually ambitious thing I've built. 116 retro art assets for a word game.
April 2026 Update
The latest pass added a no-bill HD voice option: players can opt into Kokoro neural voices in the browser, while the app still falls back to Edge TTS or built-in system voices if the larger model is not a good fit for the device.
108 Stories
Across 15 categories — Family, Travel, Spooky, Superhero, Food, Space, and more.
21 Silly Voices
Robot, chipmunk, pirate, accents, languages, plus optional HD browser voices for bigger read-aloud laughs.
Multiplayer
Round Robin and Hot Potato modes for up to 6 players. Pass-and-play perfection for game night.
Story Creator
Write your own Mad Libs with 17 word types. Save them, share them, replay them.
The Word Museum
Stats dashboard tracking every word ever played, ranked with medals. A family dictionary of silliness.
Zero Emojis
65+ custom SVG icons, 5 mascot characters (Rad-Saurus Rex, Bass-O-Matic, and friends), 116 retro AI-generated assets.
Built in React Native with Expo, Reanimated 3 for the animations, and a custom theme system. The whole thing feels like a Saturday morning cartoon from 1989, which is exactly the vibe three children demanded.
Built with Claude
The game engine was straightforward -- input forms, story templates, text substitution, reveal animations. The hard part was the comedy. Writing 108 stories that are actually funny when random words get dropped in took dozens of rounds of revision, most of it driven by feedback from my kids.
The visual direction took just as long. I wanted a specific aesthetic -- Memphis dots, floating cassettes, neon gradients -- and getting it right meant the difference between something that looked like it was designed in 1988 and something designed to look like 1988. We went through 65 custom SVG icons to get there.