No Solos Alpha
There's a giant evil AI on screen. A room full of strangers has to take it down together. That's the game.
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.
How It Works
Scan & Join
QR code on your phone. Pick tank, DPS, or support. You're in the raid.
Auto-Battle
Heroes fight automatically. The boss AI adapts. Watch the big screen.
Community Win
Everyone contributes. No one solos a world boss.
Under the Hood
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
What We're Building Next
Live Experience
Sportscast-style broadcast overlays, live spectating from your phone, and boss AI that adapts to the crowd. 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. Community-focused cooperative play that brings people together around things that matter.
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. No Solos Alpha is the first one. It won't be the last.
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.