Brain Box – The Safe Space text adventure game | Hacker News Reader

Brain Box – The Safe Space text adventure game

strangemachine.tv

21 pointsdurakot7 comments

As interactive fiction this is very well executed. I'm some part of the way through the story from one character's perspective so I don't know how far it goes, but is this a (for lack of a better word) novelization of the entire plot of the movie? And did you make it?

Late to finding out about the HN mention, but I made this! And yes, it's an adaptation of the entire movie, but with the twist of making every character the 'main' character.

There's a text-based adventure in the movie that the characters play briefly, so this riffs on that. Happy to answer any questions.

Does the game "spoil" the movie? Like, is the movie's entire plot included or is it more of a prologue? And were you involved with the movie?

It's a neat idea with beautiful execution and I hope it gets more attention in other places than it got here. I'm not even sure what genre it is. It's not a game in the sense of requiring the player to solve anything, more of a novel in which the reader chooses a perspective and shapes the narrative but (AFAICT) cannot really direct the plot. Was the author of the game's text the same writer as the movie's plot and dialogue?

edit to add, also, was this built with an existing interactive fiction engine or was the site custom coded?

The entire plot of the movie is included. You could play through entire story, but in practice that would take a very long time, even with digressions -- and even then, it would be the story just through a specific character's perspective.

The idea was to make something that stood alongside the movie as a companion piece, an alternative way of experiencing it, rather than just a promotional thing. It's been fun seeing players playing for 4+ hours and barely getting through the first half, when the movie itself is 90 minutes and change.

I may try to post a Show HN later this week with more details, since the technical details are kind of fun. It's fully custom-coded and uses some LLMs under the hood (more as a 'game master' than in a creative capacity). I worked with the writer/director of the film to translate the script to a more interactive-friendly format, but he basically did the interactive adaptation himself.

I worked on the movie as a technical consultant and they credited me as 'unix wrangler' (I can check having an imdb page off my bucket list I guess)...

Easter eggs if anyone finds this and reads this far: try typing 'chloe' or 'camus' in the character selection screen.

Very interesting, I hope you do. Anything new and weird is always fun to learn about the design, and I'm curious just how much of the text is LLM how much is hand-written. (Fair warning people will assume the worst if you are not explicit about that) The continuity is very good but I had assumed there must be some LLM involvement just due to the time it takes to load each page. Actually, now that I think of it, even if all/most of the text were from an LLM, I'm surprised it wouldn't be generated beforehand and loaded as static text. So what is being done when the spinner spins?

I also really enjoyed the Popov "biography", I'm a sucker for that kind of is-it-true-or-is-it-performance-art stuff online. Reminds me of the Velocity Gnome saga[0].

I'm not sure why your comments were being flagged but hopefully the HN algorithm knows you're not spam at this point.

0: Very sad to see this site is dead - https://web.archive.org/web/20250317181550/https://thefuture...

It isn't as obvious as it maybe should be, but in classic text-based adventure fashion you can also type your own 'actions' (in addition to the four default choices). We use LLMs to basically manage incorporating any player actions without letting them derail the story (too much).

There's also some caching involved which resets every 24 hours, so you will have a slightly different experience each time you play through (even if you choose the same character).

I also love the whole early 2000s ARG stuff I think it was a big part of the inspiration for the movie.

My safe word is stop! By which I mean go... it's so exciting

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