# Costume Squad

> A group Halloween costume planner at https://costume-squad.skillsafe.ai/. Enter who is dressing up, what each person already owns, their budget and their limits. Costume Squad pitches three group themes cast to your people, then builds the chosen one into a per-person plan that reads from across a dark room.

Built on the Character Design skill by @omer-metin (https://skillsafe.ai/skill/@omer-metin/character-design): the three-read rule (silhouette, then color blocks, then detail), shape language, character families that share a palette but differ in silhouette, and palettes that survive bad lighting.

## What it does

- Pitch (lane `pitch`): exactly three different group themes, each casting every member once, with a per-person cost estimate, difficulty, what makes the set read as a group, and risks.
- Build (lane `build`): one theme turned into a plan per person: the silhouette that identifies them, two or three color blocks with hex values, a signature piece, what to pull from their own closet, what to buy inside their budget, DIY steps, face and hair that respect their limits, a dark-room visibility note, a photo lineup order and a dated countdown to October 31.
- Declined: requests that use a real ethnicity, nationality, religion or culture as a costume, or race makeup, are declined with a respectful alternative.

## Free, in the browser

- Squad editor with paste-a-list parsing ("Ana | $30 | owns: black jeans | no face paint").
- Countdown to Halloween, budget totals, closet counts, and a trend board from Google's 2026 Frightgeist list and TikTok's October trends, dimmed when a theme does not fit the group size.
- Content guard that blocks race makeup, ethnicity-as-costume and real tragedies before anything is sent.
- After a run, checks: every member cast exactly once, closet items actually listed by that person, buys within budget, value contrast for a dark room (a light value or a named light source), look-alike members (same shape and same main color family), and countdown steps that fit the days left.
- Lineup view in Color, Squint (blurred color blocks) and Silhouette modes, exportable as PNG or SVG.
- Exports: group-chat message, Markdown, shopping-list CSV, JSON, printable costume cards.

## Cost

Pitch and build runs need a SkillSafe account and are metered (about $0.13 is reserved per run and only what is used is charged). The bundled examples, the trend board and every check above are free.

## API

Docs: https://costume-squad.skillsafe.ai/api.html. Base URL https://api.skillsafe.ai/v1/app-api. Input is a flat JSON object: `task` ("pitch" | "build"), `members` (JSON-encoded array of {name, budget, owns, limits, notes}), `occasion`, `vibe`, `seeds`, `theme`, `casting`, `days_left`, `prescan`. Output is one JSON object with `lane` = pitch | build | declined.

## Trend sources

- https://variety.com/2026/shopping/news/google-top-trending-halloween-costumes-2026-shop-online-1236910312/
- https://www.mentalfloss.com/holidays/halloween/most-popular-halloween-costumes-2026-ranked
- https://www.socialpilot.co/blog/tiktok-trends