Dev Solanki

Why I Built Forge

Let me introduce myself properly. I'm Dev Solanki, and Forge is the kind of thing you build when you're supposed to be relaxing during a vacation but instead find yourself hunched over a laptop at 2 AM, debugging WebSocket connections and muttering at your terminal. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I built Forge because I love trivia, but I was tired of playing the same questions on other platforms. You know the feeling — you've seen that question about the capital of Australia three times already, and the answer choices are always in the same predictable order. It stops being fun and starts feeling like memorizing a dusty database. I wanted something that felt alive. Something where every round was genuinely new, where I could challenge friends in real time without any lag, and where I could type literally any topic and get a fresh quiz in seconds.

But honestly? I also built this because I wanted to see if I could. As a student, there's nothing more thrilling than taking an idea from your notebook and turning it into something that actually works — something that other people can use and enjoy. Forge is my proof of concept that a solo developer can harness modern AI to create a genuinely fun, scalable, real-time game with zero infrastructure budget.

What Makes Forge Different

The biggest difference is right in the name — AI Trivia Showdown. Every single question you see in Forge is generated on the fly by Google Gemini AI, not pulled from a static list. That means no repeats, no stale facts, and no limits on topics. You want a round about obscure 90s anime? Done. A deep dive into cricket World Cup finals? Absolutely. Questions about a scientific breakthrough from last month? Gemini already knows about it.

The second difference is real-time multiplayer. When you're playing against friends, everyone answers the exact same questions at the exact same time, with live scoring that updates as soon as you submit. No turn-based waiting, no refresh buttons — just pure, head-to-head speed and knowledge. It feels like being in a quiz hall, even if you're alone in your room.

And because the questions are AI-generated, you can choose literally any topic. Movies, science, history, video games, food, coding, Bollywood, cricket, quantum physics — the AI tailors the difficulty and angle based on whatever you ask for. No one else is doing this at zero cost with this level of real-time multiplayer integration.

The Technical Challenge

Building a real-time multiplayer game that talks to an AI, keeps everyone's scores in sync, and runs smoothly on the cloud is not a weekend project. As a student working alone with zero budget, I had to make every architectural decision count.

The frontend is plain Vanilla JavaScript — no React, no Vue, no frameworks. I wanted to keep it fast, lightweight, and fully portable for the Android wrapper I'm building with CapacitorJS. The backend is FastAPI, a Python framework that handles asynchronous tasks beautifully — crucial for managing dozens of simultaneous WebSocket connections without blocking. Every score update, every timer tick, every answer flows through a persistent WebSocket connection, making the game feel instantaneous.

For the AI layer, I integrated Google Gemini and built a carefully engineered prompt system that gets consistent, structured question output. Every AI response is validated with Pydantic before it reaches any player. The infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Run and Vercel — both free tier, both zero cost. The hardest part was glueing it all together while keeping latency low. There were moments I wanted to throw my laptop out the window, especially during WebSocket reconnection bugs. But every problem fixed taught me more than any lecture ever could.

Game Modes — Something for Every Mood

I designed Forge with different contexts in mind. Not everyone wants the same kind of trivia experience, so I built three distinct modes:

What I'm Working Toward