Comment by alexhans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexhans | Hacker News Reader

I love emergent behaviour and story telling. Anyone who has played City builders like Sim City or roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can be.

In a world where setting them up and letting rogue agents run rampant becomes relatively low cost and fast, I think focusing on the desired outcomes, the story telling and specially the UX for the human user, is key and maybe we can take some learnings from Will Wright on "Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games" [1].

I'm going to be unable to do much this weekend so I can't say I'll try check this out (yet?) but I'd be interested in your own experiences so far. Any surprises? Things you'd like to do next? What's most fun/challenging?

An actual report/writeup will probably resonate more than a repo for people who can't check it out easily or are not willing to.

- [1] https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Appreciate this! and yeah the will wright talk is exactly what I was leaning into.

Actually posted this on X 2 weeks ago, hosted the werld observatory public, and had gemini stream a new chapter of the story in natural language every 10,000 ticks - so it felt like reading through a david attenburgh novel of werld being born.

Most interesting thing from the last run was definitely the language and the behaviours, they decoding what they were actually saying was a difficult one, and noticing them group within their diverged species.

Up next, i want to get the storytelling side up and running too - kept running out of storage, and cloudflare playing up as usual - maybe get gemini to visualise each chapter - and get an upgraded interface for the werld observatory.

If you want to check out my previous attempt at streaming the story line - it's still on my X - https://x.com/im_urav?s=21&t=6Si-w-DvNJC7RfvSz2Aw-w

> Anyone who has played City builders like Sim City or ... knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can be.

Yes. The most intersting and fun thing in SimCity was always having to upgrade your storage. So instead of building a City you were building storage. /s

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