Live or Blank: Shell Roulette

In one line

Across a card table at the bottom of the sea, a drowned diver hands you a gun loaded with live shells and blanks: you know how many of each, never the order.

Description

Live or Blank is a shell-roulette game for iPhone. You sit in the flooded saloon of a sunken liner, across from the Purser, a drowned diver in a copper helmet. Between you lies a lever-action gun. Each load, the shells are laid out and counted, red for live and bone for blank, then fed into the gun in an order neither of you knows.

On your turn you fire once: at him, or at yourself. A blank at yourself keeps your turn; a live shell blows out one of your candles. Candles are lives. From round II a sea chest deals items to both sides: a Spyglass to see the chambered shell, a Hook to pull it out, a Tide Glass that turns live into blank, an Octopus that steals one of his items for you to use at once, and five more. Three rounds make a night, and the water rises with each.

Win a night and Deeper opens: double-or-nothing sets for salvage, where dives played online are replayed move by move by the server before they reach the board. Or play someone: an online duel against another person, refereed by the server, with a quick match or a six-letter code for a friend. No chat, just four emotes.

Features

• Fire at him or at yourself, with items that bend the odds: nine in all.
• Three rounds a night: two candles, then four, then five, and the water rising.
• The Purser plays fair: he decides only from what his own seat can see.
• Deeper: double or nothing, with a board of runs the server has checked.
• Online duels: quick match, or invite a friend with a code. First to two rounds takes the night.
• Tap, aim, hold: nothing fires on a single tap.
• Every sound is synthesised in code. No blood: candles go out.
• Plays offline against the Purser. Quit mid-night and the table waits for you.

Where it comes from

Live or Blank is an original game in the shell-roulette lineage that Mike Klubnika’s Buckshot Roulette made famous. Its setting, opponent, items, interface, sound and art are its own.

How it was made

• Built in TypeScript and three.js; the same rules engine runs on the phone and on the server that referees online matches.
• The Purser and the props were modelled with Python scripts in Blender. He moves by inverse kinematics, not hand-made animation clips.
• Every sound is synthesised in code. There is no music track.
• Some surface textures were generated with an AI image tool and finished with code. The game was developed with AI coding assistance.

Videos

Both are cut from the game itself, rendered frame by frame, with the game’s own sound. The moments are staged; the rules, rendering and sound are the game’s.

App Store preview, 26 s, vertical (.mp4)Short: “One live. Two blank.”, 19 s, vertical (.mp4)

Images

In-game captures at 1320 × 2868. Click for full size.

Logo and icon

Logo, transparent (.png)Logo on dark (.png)App icon, 1024 px (.png)

Contact

Press, creators and review copies: team@ddtechsolution.com. Happy to answer anything about how it was made.