A game born from boredom, a Discord message, and a better idea for how developers should practice their craft.
“What if the tasks were actual code?”
It started in an algorithms lecture. A couple of bored computer science students stumbled onto a thread about Among Us, and within minutes one message kicked the whole thing off: “what if the tasks were actual code?”
That was the whole idea. Simple. Obvious in retrospect. And somehow nobody had done it yet.
We spent the rest of that lecture sketching out how it would work: a shared code editor that everyone could see and edit simultaneously. One or two hidden imposters whose job was to introduce subtle bugs without being caught. An emergency meeting mechanic for calling out suspicious behaviour. A voting system to eliminate the suspected imposter.
We went home and built the first prototype over a weekend using plain WebSockets and a textarea. It was terrible. It crashed constantly, had no authentication, and the code synchronisation was basically just “last write wins” — which caused complete chaos. But when we got four of our friends to play it over Discord, something magical happened: everyone was laughing, accusing each other, typing furiously, and having the time of their lives.
We knew we had something.
The real version took months. We rebuilt everything from scratch — Next.js 14 for the frontend (the App Router made server components and routing elegant), Express with Socket.IO for real-time multiplayer (Socket.IO's room abstraction saved us weeks of work), MongoDB for game state persistence, and Y.js CRDTs for conflict-free code editor synchronisation across multiple simultaneous writers.
The hardest problem was the shared code editor. When 4–8 people type simultaneously, you need an algorithm that merges their changes without losing anyone's work and without producing nonsense. We stayed up until 3am more times than we can count. We shipped features during study breaks. We tested it with friends and small groups of fellow students — anyone who would sit down and play a round with us.
Coding was never meant to be a solo sport. The best software is built by teams who communicate, review each other's work, and challenge each other's assumptions. We built Devception to celebrate that truth.
The best lessons don't feel like lessons. When you're trying to catch an imposter mid-match, you're also practicing code review, critical thinking, and communication under pressure — without even realising it.
Trust is the foundation of great teams. And understanding how trust breaks down — through deception, through subtle sabotage — teaches you to build more resilient systems, better communication habits, and sharper instincts.
Diwanshu Gupta is the founder and lead developer of Devception. He works mostly in the messy intersection of real-time systems, game design, and developer tooling — and built Devception to make practicing code feel like a team sport instead of a solo grind.
Pratham Sharma is a founder of Devception and played a key role in shaping the vision behind the project. From early ideation to refining the gameplay experience, he helped transform a simple classroom idea into a collaborative coding game for developers.
We want Devception to become the place where developers come to practise coding with each other — not against a judge, not alone, but in a real team with real stakes.
We want it to be used in universities, bootcamps, hackathons, and team-building events. We want the imposter mechanic to teach people to read code critically, communicate under pressure, and trust their instincts.
“And honestly? We just want people to have fun.”