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
My kids think Mad Libs are the funniest thing in the world. They may be right. There is no sentence, in their view, that cannot be improved by the word "butt," and they have tested this hypothesis extensively.
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, at its core, a very simple idea. So we built our own.
It was supposed to be simple. Fill in the blanks, read the story, laugh. But then we got into the design, and the design got into us. Somewhere around the third complete redesign — this time a late-80s Memphis aesthetic with vaporwave colors — it became the most visually ambitious thing I've built. A word game probably doesn't need 116 retro art assets, and yet.
Across 15 categories — Family, Travel, Spooky, Superhero, Food, Space, and more. All family-personalized.
Robot, chipmunk, pirate, accents, languages. Text-to-speech makes the read-aloud genuinely hilarious.
Round Robin and Hot Potato modes for up to 6 players. Pass-and-play perfection for game night.
Write your own Mad Libs with 17 word types. Save them, share them, replay them.
Stats dashboard tracking every word ever played, ranked with medals. A family dictionary of silliness.
65+ custom SVG icons, 5 mascot characters (Rad-Saurus Rex, Bass-O-Matic, and friends), 116 retro AI-generated assets.
We're in the home stretch. The animated UI is locked in, the retro assets look absurdly good, and we're down to polish. It's built in React Native with Expo, uses Reanimated 3 for the animations, and has a custom theme system. The whole thing feels like a Saturday morning cartoon from 1989, which is exactly the vibe three children demanded.
The surprise with this project was that the hard part wasn't the code. It was the comedy.
Claude handled the game engine without breaking a sweat — input forms, story templates, text substitution, reveal animations. But writing 108 stories that are actually funny when random words get dropped in? That took dozens of rounds. "This one's not funny enough." "The blanks are in the wrong spots." "We need a word type for gross sounds." My children are exacting creative directors.
The visual rebrand was its own saga. I described what I wanted — Memphis dots, floating cassettes, neon gradients, the whole aesthetic — and we went through version after version until it looked like it had actually been designed in 1988, rather than designed to look like 1988. Subtle difference. Took us about sixty-five custom SVG icons to get there.
Turns out the AI can build you a flawless game engine, but it can't tell you whether "adjective noun verb past tense" is funnier than "noun verb adjective adverb." That part requires someone under the age of ten.