First Major Shipping Win: From a Concept to 80 Concurrent Players in 4 Days

I run tech for Cafe Takeover, a weekly events series in Delhi. For our last event I wanted to ship something that is never done in my city before — instead of a DJ or a trivia night, the entire room playing a live multiplayer game on their phones.

A live Among Us / Mafia mashup with hidden imposters, sabotages, and players hunting each other in real time.

4 days. React + Firebase/Firestore. Solo.

~80 concurrent players the night of the event. No crashes, no lag spikes. Firestore bill didn't go beyond 3₹.

A few things I'm proud of:

→ The matchmaking. Pairing two players inside a room of 80 all hunting at once. A queue holds requests for milliseconds, pairs the first two compatible players atomically, and writes the match to both docs in a single transaction. No double-pairs, no stale opponents.

→The imposter loop. Imposters trigger sabotages that hit every phone in the room within a second. Players can guess imposters back — wrong guess and you're locked out for 2 minutes with a full-screen countdown. The whole cat-and-mouse runs entirely off Firestore state, no server, no socket layer.

→The admin panel. Real-time control surface giving me live visibility into the running game from my phone — who's alive, who's blocked, who's winning, manual override hooks for when something weird happens in the room. Saved the night twice.

→The atmosphere. 16 personalities, 5 sabotages, atomic leaderboard scoring. Enough variation that no two rounds played the same.

The end result: 80 strangers, an hour of nonstop hunting, every phone in the room locked into its own private duel. People who weren't there are still asking when the next one is.

Massive thanks to

@Jake Van Clief

. Genuinely couldn't have shipped this in 4 days without the methodology. The CONTEXT discipline is the thing — when something broke at 2am I traced it to one file in seconds instead of digging through a tangle.

That's what bought me the time to actually polish the game feel instead of fighting my own codebase. First project where I actually saw the impact

Here is a reel i made about it as well

https://www.instagram.com/p/DXqzqPbiTFD/

0 comments