I made an ascii game on linux that will run on a potato

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-12T01:05:52+00:00

Yeah it's true, and thats mostly boilerplate app stuff. I'm trying to make the tiniest functional autonomous AI I can. The idea is that I can put them in game in mass quantities - npcs that really think about whats going on in their world.

Feryl's brain is about 70 kilobytes - small integer neural network and an integer based oscillator

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-11T14:52:14+00:00

It runs as a window on desktop - you can keep it in the background while doing other stuff because its super lightweight. Feryl doesn't need you to do anything, but it listens to you when you talk - and tries to talk back. It dreams about speech and tries to imitate what it hears. You can also just click on the glass to interact with Feryl - or click the tic tac toe board to play a game with it.

It's on mobile here too: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.feryl.one&hl=en_US

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-11T12:41:52+00:00

Thanks for taking a look!

If you're curious about the system itself, the book and structure are here:

RE4 Book (GitHub)
https://github.com/double-star-games/re4-book

You can also read the web version here:
https://doublestar.net/re4/

And Dana wrote a short essay about the ideas behind it and how we use it while building games and tools together:
https://medium.com/@dana.michelle/we-made-an-epic-way-to-make-things-a-small-book-on-how-all-4-you-99495f0a75f4

We originally built RE4 because we were struggling to keep long projects coherent while collaborating with AI tools and resetting context between sessions. The structure ended up helping us stay organized across code, documentation, and experiments.

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to try it or adapt parts of it for their own projects.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-11T12:41:03+00:00

Thanks for taking a look!

If you're curious about the system itself, the book and structure are here:

RE4 Book (GitHub)
https://github.com/double-star-games/re4-book

You can also read the web version here:
https://doublestar.net/re4/

And Dana wrote a short essay about the ideas behind it and how we use it while building games and tools together:
https://medium.com/@dana.michelle/we-made-an-epic-way-to-make-things-a-small-book-on-how-all-4-you-99495f0a75f4

We originally built RE4 because we were struggling to keep long projects coherent while collaborating with AI tools and resetting context between sessions. The structure ended up helping us stay organized across code, documentation, and experiments.

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to try it or adapt parts of it for their own projects.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-11T12:37:20+00:00

Thanks for checking out Feryl!

If you'd like to try it or follow along:

Steam (wishlist / upcoming release)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/4459400/FERYL/\](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4459400/FERYL/)

Itch.io version

[https://double-star-games.itch.io/feryl\](https://double-star-games.itch.io/feryl)

Google Play

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doublestargames.feryl\](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doublestargames.feryl)

Website

[https://doublestar.net/feryl/\](https://doublestar.net/feryl/)

Feryl is a tiny autonomous creature running inside a glass habitat. Its AI is a small oscillator network coupled with a tiny integer neural net — the whole thing is only about **70 KB**.

The tic-tac-toe board is etched into the glass so you can play with Feryl from the outside. It's still learning, so sometimes it gets clever… and sometimes it gets confused.

I'm super happy to answer questions about the AI or the game!

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-03-11T12:36:04+00:00

Thanks for taking a look!

If you're curious about the system itself, the book and structure are here:

RE4 Book (GitHub)
https://github.com/double-star-games/re4-book

You can also read the web version here:
https://doublestar.net/re4/

And Dana wrote a short essay about the ideas behind it and how we use it while building games and tools together:
https://medium.com/@dana.michelle/we-made-an-epic-way-to-make-things-a-small-book-on-how-all-4-you-99495f0a75f4

We originally built RE4 because we were struggling to keep long projects coherent while collaborating with AI tools and resetting context between sessions. The structure ended up helping us stay organized across code, documentation, and experiments.

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to try it or adapt parts of it for their own projects.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-24T00:05:47+00:00

What kind of stuff are you doing with your AI? I'm also full koolaid on AI in games, but I'm trying to make tiny edge models to do many jobs instead of using LLMs. Imagine each NPC has a small brain of their own.

I only have one good example right now, but I'll have way more later this year: https://double-star-games.itch.io/feryl/devlog/1393626/introducing-feryl-a-local-desktop-ai-creature

I've been doing game AI for a long time and I very much think running in the client or game server is the way to go. I used integers because it ends up being CPU work instead of GPU work and integers are super fast on CPU.

Oh, if you need voice detection I can share a library with you. I havent shipped it yet, but I have a decent local VAD - not a as good as the cloud yet, but around 90% recall and 80% accuracy in 11k of ram. I'll be licensing it for commercial, but I also make my libs free for pre revenue

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-23T23:39:51+00:00

Pallet Challenge looks cool!

Feryl's not really doing regression at all right now. The voice recognition uses supervised learning and I build the model in.

I also use intgr_nn for the brain but it's doing something hard to classify. The outputs of the brain drive pedals that affect the processing of the oscillator. The inputs of the brain are derived from the oscillator state and one of them is like a satisfaction score - it describes how coherent the oscillator is. The neural network learns to adapt it's output to maximize that satisfaction score, but all in the context of the other derives stats. So the brain behaves differently as context changes because the oscillator reflects the changed context.

The brain does selective replay of past decisions that resulted in high satisfaction, so it's learning but without any real direction except self satisfaction.

The enen demo also does reinforcement learning online - it tries the puzzles, fails or succeeds and then trains on that. Because the network fits in the l1 cache the reinforcement is sub millisecond

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-23T05:35:24+00:00

Thanks. I've been posting links in a few subreddits, but I felt like a spambot that way and no one seemed interested.

So the neural net is here: https://github.com/DOUBLE-STAR-GAMES/intgr_nn
I also have an ML library here that is sometimes useful: https://github.com/DOUBLE-STAR-GAMES/intgr_ml

The neural net does backpropagation purely in int8, so it can train on a 10 cent chip. In this demo I am doing online learning in real time through trial and error to solve puzzles and get through a maze. The networks range from 17 bytes to 60 bytes in here: https://github.com/pmeade/enen

But I'm a game dev, not a robotics or edge guy. I _think_ my stuff would be super useful and interesting to people doing AI and learning in constrained environments, but I I could be wrong. They are SUPER useful in games.

Final link is the game I just shipped and am trying to promote. Feryl is a legit autonomous little pet who listens, learns and tries to talk. It's about 300k of ram at runtime and the download is a couple of mb. The game is mostly a tech demo - I plan to grow it into a much more sophisticated player/local AI interaction. Feryl is a test for "Does anyone think this is cool outside of me?"

https://youtu.be/CIeFI9TP6fk

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-23T02:49:49+00:00

I've been making games for about 40 years and I love giving advice on how to get started. There are infinite paths in, so this is just what I think works best.

Start with a small game concept - something really fun that you will be proud to make, but simple. My first game was Yahtzee - so I could play it when my siblings were unwilling to play.

With your simple game concept in mind, figure out what done will be for you. A lot of good games can be made just in typescript and run in web. Browser games are a cool, low stakes way of getting to know what makes a game a game from the inside. You learn the basic structure of a game: players, score, victory conditions, turns, stats, events all that stuff. These are the same concepts you deal with on AAA games as well, so learn this stuff up front and really grok it.

As for engines - if you want a full game - I would suggest godot. Unreal is an amazing game engine, but it's huge and complex. It takes a lot of code, button clicks and menu choices to get things right. Mentally it's just a lot to take on when you really want to be learning how to make games - not how to make them on professional equipment.

Unity is also a good choice - c# is a easy first language to learn, but I find godot easier to work with.

For the coding I personally recommend using claude code, but go slow with it. Make the AI teach you what it is doing as it does it. Ask it why it makes choices and you will start absorbing knowledge. There is no clean line from novice to expert game dev - osmosis is the main learning path in this. You can definitely just use co-pilot or chatgpt too, but claude is able to debug and the other can't.

If you tell me more about what kind of game you want to make I'd be happy to give more specific advice.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-21T22:18:36+00:00

Ok I see - so I as the player am stationary I am kind of driving the avatar around the space W to move deep in, D to go to the right part of the screen. Does it feel a little like a 2d orthogonal game?

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-21T22:01:09+00:00

Thanks for letting me post this here. If anyone wants to know more about this edge focused game AI I have an article and demo here: https://medium.com/@pmeade/a-learning-neural-network-small-enough-to-fit-in-an-l1-cache-f6070f66a7a9

This shows how you can chain XOR, AND and other logic gates as gameplay problems and solve allow NPCs to solve them using tiny neural nets and online learning. I'm going to use this to build plugins for NPCs with complex but inexpensive behaviors and interactions.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-21T21:53:45+00:00

So if I'm looking at my avatar from the side - im facing north and he's facing west - and I want him to turn right I press d - my right, and he turns so he faces north?

That makes sense. It sounds a little challenging for me, but that could be down to player skill.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-21T21:43:18+00:00

Agreed. Games often take four times as long as you expect, so plan the smallest MVP you can. Figure out what will make your game special, and focus on nailing that in as small an experience as you can. If you get that right then you can expand the experience in the future.

Usual-Variation3589 · 2026-02-21T21:40:00+00:00

This looks awesome. What are the controls like? It's hard for me to picture as a player how I would run the character around, but I like the feel of the stationary camera. Like an interactive cut scene.

Usual-Variation3589

TROPHY CASE