There’s a giant evil AI on screen. A room full of strangers has to take it down together. That’s the game. The rest of this post is why we built it.

What It Is

No Solos Alpha is a community raid boss game built by RIT. A boss — OUTRAGE, an evil corpo AI — dominates the booth display at conventions and events. Attendees scan a QR code on their phone, pick a hero class — tank, DPS, or support — and join the raid. Heroes auto-battle. The boss fights back. The room watches.

Free to play. The spectacle is the point.

For the Curious

You don’t need to be a gamer or know what a “raid boss” is. Walk up. Scan. Pick a character. You’re in. Your hero shows up on the big screen alongside everyone else’s. When the boss stomps and half the raid party goes down, the room groans together. When someone lands a massive hit, people cheer.

It’s built to be the thing at an event that makes strangers talk to each other. That’s the whole design goal.

Under the Hood

The game is vanilla JavaScript — no frameworks, no libraries. One Canvas 2D render loop, hand-drawn sprites, and a Node.js server small enough to run on a phone.

That’s not a figure of speech. The server runs from Termux on an Android device, tunneled through Cloudflare. The booth TV is a wireless display. The DM laptop runs the control panel. The entire infrastructure is a phone in someone’s pocket and a WiFi hotspot.

No CDNs, no cloud APIs, no third-party fonts. The game works fully offline. When we bring it online, the only addition is a tunnel.

The constraints are intentional. Minimal infrastructure means less to secure. Fewer dependencies means fewer supply chain risks. Collecting almost no user data means there’s almost nothing to protect — or to misuse. This is what building technology responsibly looks like when you start from scratch.

How We Built It

We use AI at every step of development — code, documentation, testing, iteration. We don’t hide that or hedge about it. An AI safety nonprofit that refuses to use AI would be like a fire department that’s never seen a fire.

What AI doesn’t do is decide what we build or why. The ideas, the direction, the creative vision, and every judgment call — those are human. AI is a tool in the process, not a replacement for the people driving it.

The visual assets — character sprites, boss animations, UI art — were created by a commissioned artist working in both physical and digital media. We think that matters. Using AI to write code efficiently is one thing. Having a human artist bring characters to life is another. Both have a place, and knowing where each belongs is part of what “ethical AI use” actually means in practice.

We’re transparent about this because we think every organization using AI should be. Not with a buried disclaimer — with a clear statement of what role AI plays and where the humans are.

Why a Nonprofit Made a Game

RIT works on AI safety, civic literacy, and digital privacy. Those are hard topics to get people to engage with at a convention booth.

So we built something people actually want to walk up to.

No Solos Alpha is a conversation starter. The boss is literally an evil corpo AI. The heroes are the community fighting back. It’s not subtle. It’s not meant to be. But the point isn’t the game — it’s the five minutes after, when someone asks “so what does your organization actually do?” and we get to talk about the work that matters.

The game collects only what it needs to function: a hero name, a class, and an email for returning players. No tracking. No analytics. No selling data. Donation billing goes through Stripe and PayPal — we never touch card numbers. That’s not a feature we added. It’s how we think all software should work.

Supporting RIT

Donations at the booth go to RIT — not to the game. RIT is a 501(c)(3), so contributions are tax-deductible. In the game, donations happen to unlock stronger attacks, but the money funds the organization’s broader mission: AI safety research, civic education programs, and tools for digital privacy.

The game cost almost nothing to build. It runs on a phone. The real cost is the work RIT does beyond the booth — and that’s what donations support.

What We’re Building Next

The event version of No Solos Alpha is a starting point. We’re developing it along two tracks:

The live experience — sportscast-style broadcast overlays, live spectating from your phone, and boss AI that adapts to the crowd. We want every event to feel like a real broadcast — leaderboards, a wall of heroes, the energy of a shared fight.

Persistent online play — a version that lives beyond the event. Spectate from anywhere. Damage that carries over. The kind of cooperative, community-focused game that doesn’t really exist yet, because nobody’s built one where the point is bringing people together around things that matter rather than keeping them engaged for ad revenue.

The bigger picture is the format itself. A raid boss is a problem too big for one person — and that’s a pretty good metaphor for most of the issues RIT cares about. We think there’s something powerful in giving communities a way to show up for a cause that feels approachable, non-partisan, and local — even when the medium is digital. No Solos Alpha is the first one. It won’t be the last.

Both tracks are early. We’re showing the tech demo at CypherCon 2026 and building from there.

See It Live

RIT is at CypherCon 2026 (April 1-2, Milwaukee). Stop by the booth. Scan the code. Fight the boss. Ask us what we’re really up to.

No one solos a world boss.