Codoo
A word game where your teammate is a language model. You give the clues; it has to guess the code word, and the taboo words are off limits.
Reconstructed from the archive. Bill's own account of Codoo is still to come.
The Curiosity
Taboo works because your partner is human and you share a lifetime of references. In 2023 a language model could suddenly hold up its end of a conversation. Could it hold up its end of a game?
The Build
A mobile game built around one loop: you get a code word, a category and a list of taboo words; you write clues; your AI partner guesses. A prompt budget and a word budget keep the clues tight. Difficulty scales, partners come in tiers, and an in-game host called Ada runs the rounds.
The build was documented in five devlogs on the devlog channel: the first prototype, a UI overhaul with an asset store and coding challenges, a history tab and analytics, and finally sound, unlockables and the store submission.
The Result
Released on Google Play. Retired when the yearly store maintenance stopped making sense for a finished game.
What We Learned
The app stores want a heartbeat every year, even from things that do not need to change. That one annoyance pushed everything after Codoo onto the web, where a finished thing can simply stay finished.