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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

It's been a background thought of mine for a while:

* create a basic text adventure (or MUD) with a very spartan api-like representation

* use an LLM to embellish the description served to the user etc. With recent history in context the LLM might even kinda reference things the user asked previously etc.

* have NPCs implemented as own LLMs that are trying to 'play the game'. These might be using the spartan API directly like they are agents.

Its a fun thought experiment!

(An aside: I found that the graphical text adventure that I made for Ludum Dare 23 is still online! Although it doesn't render quite right in modern browsers.. things shouldn't have broken! But anyway https://williame.github.io/ludum_dare_23_tiny_world/)

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I've done something along these lines! https://github.com/heyitsguay/trader

The challenge for me was consistency in translating free text from dialogs into classic, deterministic game state changes. But what's satisfying is that the conversations aren't just window dressing, they're part of the game mechanic.

deterministic game state changes

I found this to be the actual strenuous work in LLM based development. While it appears like AI has made everything easy and free, the particular challenge of consistently getting deterministic outputs takes serious programming effort. It feels like an entirely new job role. In other words, I wouldn't do this for free, it takes too much effort.

Have you seen https://www.aidungeon.com They started with GPT-2 in a google collab. You should put something together and try it, it's easier than ever to get a simple version of that working.

Gwern has an interesting take on this: https://gwern.net/cyoa By pivoting to "choose your own adventure"-style games, multiple issues (quality, costs) might be resolved.

I've been working on something just like that off and on for a couple months. It's a MUD where all the NPCs are controlled by LLMs that interact with the world with the same commands that players use. I got it to the point where the NPCs can navigate the world, interact with each other, and even create things. But they often get on rabbit trails and forget their original task, so I need to build a memory system and something like the task list in Claude Code. My goal is to have a fully simulated town that the player can interact with.

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