Game Backend Mobile Development

For How Much?

A party game we built in 48 hours during a weekend in Chartres

Posted by Clement Wang on May 18, 2025 • Calculating...

The story

This one’s a bit different from my usual posts. Sometimes you just do something ridiculous with friends and see what sticks.

I had my permanent job for already 6 months as a data scientist and I’d been feeling the need to actually build something, so two friends and I planned a weekend away with a twist: we’d build something from scratch while we were there. One of them is a project manager, the other a software engineer. We’re the kind of people who get bored if we’re not building or planning something. So we picked Chartres, a small city in the center of France, and decided we’d enjoy the town and ship a project in less than 48 hours.

Paris → Chartres (straight-line distance).

When we showed up on Friday night, we started brainstorming. The idea we actually wanted was social media analytics for ourselves: how many hours we waste on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, what themes we watch the most, etc. We spent a few hours on it and gave up around 10pm. Getting data out of those platforms is basically a brick wall. APIs are locked down, scraping is a mess, and we weren’t about to spend the weekend reverse‑engineering Instagram. So much for that.

We had a hard time finding another idea we liked. So we went with the dumb one: For How Much? You know the game. Someone asks: “For how much would you [do something insane]?” and everyone has to answer with a number. For how much would you answer every question honestly for a week? For how much would you eat only mustard for a month? That kind of thing. We figured we could make it into a real app, pass one phone around, and actually play it that weekend.

Question page

How the game works

We wanted it dead simple and actually playable with a group. So the whole thing runs on one phone that gets passed around. No accounts, no syncing. Just “your turn, type your answer, hand it to the next person.” At the end of the round you see everyone’s answers, anonymous, plus the average. We also highlight the answer that’s furthest from the average so there’s always one person who’s either a psychopath or a saint, and the rest of the group gets to argue about who it is. It’s low stakes, a bit silly, and it actually sparks good conversations (and some very questionable honesty).

Comparison page

The question database

We didn’t write 282 questions by hand. We used ChatGPT: “Give us 10 questions in category X,” then we’d skim, keep the good ones, throw out the bland or weird ones, and repeat. After a bunch of rounds we had 282 questions in 20 categories. A few of them:

  • Absurd, Deep, Edgy, Ethics: for when you want to get philosophical or unhinged
  • Food, Habits, Health, Sport, Travel: classic “how far would you go” stuff
  • Career & Lifestyle, Childhood & Family, Relationships: good for learning how your friends think
  • NSFW / Spicy, Trashy: we’re adults, it’s a party game
  • Creativity & Skills, Mind & Perception, Nature, Series / Films, Socials, World Impact / Legacy: so there’s something for every mood

Some of ChatGPT’s suggestions were unusable (too vague or too dark). The rest gave us enough variety that you can play for a long time without repeating the same vibe.

A few examples of questions:

  • For how much would you marry someone your parents picked? (Childhood & Family)
  • For how much would you be drunk in a serious meeting? (Trashy)
  • For how much would you flirt with someone you hate? (Trashy)
  • For how much would you stop lying for the rest of your life? (Deep)
  • For how much would you separate your personal life and your professionnal life like in Severance? (Series / Films)

Tech stack

Backend: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, MySQL. We didn’t need anything fancy: one device at a time, no real concurrency, so a simple API and a local DB were enough. No auth, no scaling. Just “give me a question” and “save these answers.” It was refreshing to build something that didn’t need to be bulletproof.

Frontend: React Native with Expo. We ran it on our phones via Expo Go so we could test in real time. I hadn’t touched mobile in about 10 years when I started coding for fun during high school. Back then I found Android Studio painful and front-end code boring. This time, with Cursor and modern tooling, it was actually enjoyable. Things have changed a lot; we had a working app in 48 hours without wanting to throw the laptop out the window.

Conclusion

We visited Chartres, built a working game, and had a great weekend. The app did what we wanted: one phone, pass it around, anonymous answers, average, and one designated outlier to blame. If you’re ever in the mood to build something silly with friends in a weekend, “For how much would you?” is a surprisingly solid format, and way easier to ship than social media analytics.

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