Boloney!

Boloney! is Liar’s Dice as a real-time multiplayer game on a Nakama game server, built at Kryha as a public showcase for Aleo’s zero-knowledge blockchain. I was one of six regular contributors across ~10 months, working full-stack (Nakama backend + React frontend).

The framing that matters most

Boloney’s headline is “Liar’s Dice with real zero-knowledge proofs,” and it genuinely is. But the ZK work itself lives in a separate repo, zk-gaming-toolkit, where I have one commit of 107. The proofs and circuits, the commit-reveal hash-chain RNG, and the ZK enable/disable plumbing were all teammates’ work.

So my honest claim is specific and true: I built the game a ZK system had to plug into. The one thing I can point at directly in the ZK direction is that I deleted the placeholder dice roller that called a public random-number API — twice, nine months apart — as the real Aleo-backed integration came online. I retired the “fake” RNG so the real one could take its place.

What I owned

• The match state machine, generations 1 & 2 — from a bare switch with empty stages to the stage-flow with readiness tracking that the team later refactored into a third generation.
• The backend timer service — stage timeouts tied to Nakama’s tick rate, with handleOutOfTime auto-rolling dice, force-advancing stuck stages, or forfeiting an AFK player’s turn so a real-time match never stalls on a disconnected player.
• Six power-ups end to end — backend logic, types, and frontend UI (Heal Dice, Hypnosis, Smoke and Mirrors, Menage à Trois, Vendetta, Second Chance).
• Aleo-wallet auth, built twice — an early Aleo-account hook, then the full Leo-wallet signature flow.
• Physically simulated 3D dice — three.js + cannon.js rigid-body physics for how dice tumble and settle, reconciled against a server-authoritative roll value the physics didn’t control. Not a CSS keyframe of a die face: the dice had to look physical and land on a value the simulation had no say in.

What I did not build — said plainly

The ZK circuits and proof generation (zk-gaming-toolkit), the hash-chain RNG, and the game’s third-generation state machine are not mine. Some of the more exciting-looking output of this project belongs to teammates, and I won’t fold it into “things I built.”

A real tradeoff

Frontend was ~33k lines of TypeScript but just one test file despite a fully configured Jest setup, and the project shipped zero versioned releases — deploys were continuous off long-lived branches. Fine for a showcase game; worth naming plainly.