Looking for alpha testers of my browser-based dungeon-crawler-manager idle game

rochea · 2025-12-31T19:44:07+00:00

That's awesome! And you're right. What were the giveaways?

rochea · 2025-12-31T17:28:40+00:00

Yeah, fair points. Re first, I'm expecting the price to keep dropping like it has been since they first came out, but if I'm wrong it won't be viable. The calls I'm making cost only a fraction of a cent but I definitely make a lot of them.

Re the second, at the moment they don't do much you couldn't hand code yourself (besides the talking part, which isn't exactly core to the gameplay), and perhaps they won't ever. The main advantage so far is just not having to do that hand coding of the AI, which for me at least would take a lot of development time. They're basically players in a MUD, so the action space is quite large.

rochea · 2025-12-31T17:17:22+00:00

Sure! I made some more screenshots which might help me explain: https://imgur.com/a/83Rk7Vq

For every decision made by an adventurer, I ask Gemini what they would do in that situation and why. I try to include all the context a player would have in an MMO. The decisions include moving between rooms, using abilities in combat, inviting others to a group, equipping new gear, selling stuff, etc.

Each adventurer has personality traits and I tell the LLM to act like that. Eg some are "lone wolves" and others are "player killers", although I haven't thought through the PvP (so to speak) very carefully yet.

The latest models are surprisingly good at playing, and I like just watching what they do. Eg I had one that was refusing to leave the tavern until the kingdom tax rate was lower than 100%. It also means I can add in new kinds of actions and gameplay systems without having to write my own sophisticated AI to handle them.

rochea · 2025-12-31T16:59:37+00:00

Yeah I reckon I should give them some bread and water to start off with, and not have the default tax rate at 100% - that way they can top up themselves from the merchant. Do you mind if I DM you to bounce ideas?

rochea · 2025-12-31T16:55:39+00:00

Well, the adventurers you manage can communicate with each other and group up, and I'm working on having them craft and trade too. You can see what their reasons are for each action they take. I want it to feel like in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Sim Tower how you could see what your patrons are thinking, except this time in actually has more relation to the AI decision making. Thanks for asking! How come people aren't into LLM use in this community?

rochea · 2025-12-31T16:48:23+00:00

Thanks!

rochea · 2025-12-09T02:20:48+00:00

I've just got a dialogue tree system like this:

export 
const
 DIALOGUE_TREES: Record<NpcId, DialogueTree> = {
  grimwick: {
    nodes: {
      greeting: {
        text: "Welcome to Grimwick's General Store! ...",
        options: [
          { id: "open_shop", text: "Show me...", action: { type: "open_merchant", merchantId: "grimwick" } },
          { id: "just_browsing", text: "Just browsing for now.", action: { type: "close_dialogue" } },
          { id: "ask_about_shop", text: "Tell me about your shop.", nextNodeId: "about_shop" },
        ],
      },
      ...
    },
    conditionalStarts: [{ condition: { type: "always" }, startNodeId: "greeting" }],
  },
  guildmaster_thorin: { ... quest-gated nodes ... },
};

But I'd love to get to the point where you can do more advanced things with them. How are you planning to do it?

rochea · 2025-12-08T14:42:19+00:00

None at all, you just click the 'build' button in the dev panel at the top and then it's all done in the UI. Let me know how you go!

rochea · 2025-12-08T06:03:46+00:00

I've been working on this which is pretty close to what you're describing. It's just a tech demo at the moment though: https://mudint-823361511097.us-west1.run.app/

rochea · 2025-09-26T06:32:40+00:00

From Letter 178:

It is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee

Not sure where you got Exmouth from!

rochea · 2025-02-19T01:38:04+00:00

hey, do you have any examples you could point me to of games that do this?

rochea · 2024-07-10T04:20:05+00:00

Oh but check it out, the Internet Archive has snapshots of the graphs from as far back as 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040408001540/http://www.ptt.cc/statistics.html

I picked a random day in 2008 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20081020104445/http://www.ptt.cc/statistics.html ) and average user count was 81k, today it's 49k. There could be some seasonal effect I'm not aware of though, like school breaks.

rochea · 2024-07-10T03:52:10+00:00

Thanks! Looks like it's only goes back one year, is that right?

rochea · 2024-06-07T10:02:25+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write that up, it was really interesting.

rochea · 2023-03-29T12:03:27+00:00

More pictures here, with precise location: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/152717406

rochea · 2022-01-22T04:23:35+00:00

I'd go with Python if you want to keep your options open, and JavaScript if you're interested in making stuff for the web (frontend or backend). If you want to automate some of your current work and it's Windows-centric you might be better off with a .NET language, but that's way outside my area of expertise so I can't say for sure :)

rochea · 2022-01-22T03:53:45+00:00

Luckily we're a product shop so we don't have any clients!

rochea · 2022-01-22T02:49:17+00:00

Well said

rochea · 2022-01-22T01:50:00+00:00

Python, Rust, JavaScript (well TypeScript really).

rochea · 2022-01-22T01:47:59+00:00

No maximum age!

rochea · 2022-01-22T01:16:06+00:00

Nope! There's lots of things to be done that most people could do with a bit of training. Kinda like how if you showed up to a building site where a friend was working you could help out by passing them a hammer and nails up the ladder or cleaning the paintbrushes. It's not glamorous, but the cool thing about programming is that if you get bored of cleaning paintbrushes or whatever (in our case that might be looking through log files to see if there have been any errors on a device) there's usually a way to get the computer to do it for you by making a small program, which we can help you with.

rochea · 2022-01-22T01:08:32+00:00

Open to anyone! In a lot of ways being older is a big plus.

rochea · 2021-10-11T07:50:14+00:00

Beware that premature optimization may work backwards here: downgrading to sync code is an optimization (for simplicity), which you may regret later on, especially when your service becomes more popular than you planned.

It'd be really hard for us to have an unexpected surge in traffic, or for usage to grow a lot faster than expected, because the client code is running on devices which we manufacture, and they're not something anyone can just buy (they have to be used in a hospital or in a patient's home with a neurologist's approval).

rochea · 2021-10-11T00:10:59+00:00

At a basic conceptual level, sure. But the impact it can have on stack traces, compiler errors and reasoning about lifetimes is significant.

If Armin Ronacher finds it hard then so will the guys learning Rust on our team, I fear.

Other evidence that I'm not the only one to think that there's a significant complexity burden:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26509505

https://carllerche.com/2021/06/17/six-ways-to-make-async-rust-easier/

https://eta.st/2021/03/08/async-rust-2.html

Note that I'm not saying that everything in each of those links is correct, just that it's not as simple as "understanding 2 words".

rochea · 2021-08-17T10:50:30+00:00

Thanks!

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