Sat Oct 15 2022
Developed as part of a Mobile App Development course, Handshake Murder is a digital take on the theatre game of the same name — a social deduction experience where players secretly hunt for a murderer hidden among physical handshakes.
Written by: DarthPackman
Handshake Murder was developed for COMP 2160, Mobile App Development 1 (Fall 2022) as a digital adaptation of the theatre game of the same name, and was Transhuman Games’ first project. In the original party game, one player is secretly the murderer and moves through the group shaking hands — anyone they choose to “kill” during a handshake falls dead moments later, and the surviving players try to work out who’s responsible before it’s too late. The app’s goal was to fully automate that experience: tracking roles, handling handshakes electronically, and managing voting and win conditions without anyone needing to keep score by hand.
The planned flow had players join or host a lobby, then land on a shared in-game screen showing a player count/health bar, a killer progress bar, a timer, a handshake button, and a vote button. Investigators would go around shaking hands (pressing the handshake button while holding phones together) while quietly trying to identify the murderer; the murderer would appear to shake hands normally, but their vote button doubled as a secret kill button. A killed investigator would feel a vibration alert immediately, then a second vibration 10 seconds later confirming their death. Investigators could end the game early by accusing the right (or wrong) player through the vote screen, with a wrong guess costing them their own life.
This project ended up being more design exercise than finished product. The handshake detection layer — first attempted over direct WiFi, then reworked around NFC — never reached a reliably working state and was ultimately deprecated rather than shipped. Supporting features like a statistics screen and in-app settings were scoped as stretch goals from the start and didn’t make it in either. What did come together was the underlying app architecture: the lobby system, shared state management, and the dual-role structure that the (non-functional) handshake layer was meant to plug into.
Handshake Murder is best understood as a proof-of-concept for the app’s architecture and social-deduction design rather than a fully working game — the core mobile app structure came together, but the physical handshake mechanic that the whole concept depends on remained unreliable through the course’s timeline.
You can view the source code and project repository here.