Just Dog Labs
Just Dog Labs is a two-person indie lab building multiplayer games, competitive tools, and experiments. We ship things people actually play together.
Most software is built to be used alone. We think the interesting problems start when you add other people. Real-time state, hidden information, social deduction, simultaneous decisions, the tension of a bluff called or a bid placed one tick too late — these are hard problems, and they're the ones worth solving.
We build party games with real game theory underneath. We build fantasy sports tools driven by actual trade value models. We rebuild cult classics in 3D because we think they deserve it. Everything we ship is playable, and most of it is multiplayer from day one.
Build to play
Games are better when you make them for yourself first.
We start every project as something we want to play with friends. That constraint is useful — it means the game has to be fun in a room with four people, not just elegant in a design doc. If we can't get a group to play it twice, it doesn't ship.
Our game engine handles the hard parts: real-time synchronization, bot play, LLM-powered content generation, spectator mode, and plugin isolation so every game is self-contained but shares the same infrastructure. This lets us build a new game in days, not months.
Small teams, sharp tools
Two people and a good stack beat a team of twenty with meetings.
We run lean. Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for real-time state. No traditional servers, no database management, no DevOps team. The entire platform deploys in seconds and scales to zero when nobody's playing.
Every game is a plugin — a set of types, constants, logic, bots, and a React component. The platform handles rooms, authentication, reconnection, and spectating. This architecture means we can ship a complete game from concept to production in a single sitting.
What we're building
Three projects, one philosophy: make things people use together.
GameStack
A platform for real-time multiplayer party games. 30+ games ranging from social deduction to trivia to cooperative puzzles. Built on Cloudflare's edge infrastructure with WebSocket rooms, AI bots, and LLM-powered content generation. Every game supports 2-20 players with classic and AI bot opponents.
gamestack.pages.dev →Town of Salem 3D
A from-scratch rebuild of the classic social deduction game in 3D. Mafia-style hidden roles, day/night cycles, investigations, and executions — rendered with animated sprites, atmospheric lighting, and a fully reactive UI. The server runs entirely on a single Durable Object.
town-of-salem-3d.pages.dev →Dynasty Value
Dynasty fantasy football trade calculator and value tool. Player rankings backed by real data, with a trade evaluator that accounts for age curves, positional scarcity, and league scoring format.
dynasty-value.pages.dev →Open by default
Progress is faster when shared.
We write about what we build and how we build it on our Lab Notes blog. Architecture decisions, game design tradeoffs, infrastructure choices, post-mortems — the kind of writing we wish existed when we started. Our code lives on GitHub.