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Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

kathaaverse.com

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#81
post #44

From what I've seen, it doesn't seem like AI is very good at keeping track of events in a way that makes a logical narrative. I tried "The Hobbit" and it started with me having tea with Gandalf the wizard. There was a knock at the front door so I opened it and outside was Gandalf the wizard!

Classic Gandalf

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#83
Congrats on the launch. I think maybe you should get the LLM to pre-compute the paths and store the results. Getting it to calculate every branch of the story as you go presents a few problems: - When it is busy (like it is now), everyone is just waiting for the next section of text. - You are going to burn tokens, even when multiple people are following the same path

That said, the way you have done it means it is roughly unique each time.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#85

It's a pretty cool proof of concept. I did run into some weirdness with it right away when trying the Harry Potter book. The app kept switching between 2nd and 3rd person for Harry. The main thing for me, though, was the feeling of emptiness I got while playing. I love text adventures, having grown up with Infocom games. The thing about them is that you can feel the choices made by the writer / programmer, just like…

Freedom is valuable in games, especially text adventure games. And an LLM is a powerful way to give the player freedom, since it can respond to almost anything. But for games to shine they also need carefully considered constraints - when the player bounces off constraints they start to understand how the game's world and systems function, which lets them build a mental model and be able to start thinking the same wa…

That's a very insightful take. I think an LLM would have some role in a good text adventure game, in terms of being able to understand any natural language input and respond intelligently. But as you point out, it would need to do so within strict constraints set by the game designer.

I haven't played with the most state of the art parsers that are available right now, so I wonder how large the gap is between a great parser and using an LLM to process user input.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course, it didnt have context lengthy enough for that I mean human sometimes forgot about the state inside the game often

A context of a few things characters? No, it definitely does. Beyond that... Would you forget that the guy you were having tea with was sitting in your living room? Anyone I know would definitely go "how the hell are you outside" not "nice to see you today".

well need more data set for that

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#87
The idea is great! Would also love for anime and manga to be included. I tried the Harry Potter game with concise and brief settings.

My thoughts: 1. Would be great to have a loader for both when I input responses and game start. 2. Got this error after I sent input (it's understandable :), since it would be getting good traction) "An error occurred while generating the story: Rate limit exceeded for shared resources. Please try again in 1 seconds, or provide your own API key in settings.. Please try again. If the problem persists, you may need to start a new game." 3. The story feels lackluster without Visuals. Even text based visuals or emojis we use in chat will be good to have. 4. Would be great if instead of chat we had dialogue selector on top of your character or story. 5. Can also change the background of the page based on book and settings selected.

Great work. Love the idea <3

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#88
> The war between the Culture and the Idirans rages across the galaxy. Trillions suffer as ideologies clash. You are Horza, a shapeshifter with a deep-seated hatred for the Culture. You find yourself on a desolate world, a sanctuary from the fighting, when an Idiran warship appears in the sky, a black scar against the pale sun.

Honestly a strong start but I got rate limited. Very cool idea!

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#89
post #44

From what I've seen, it doesn't seem like AI is very good at keeping track of events in a way that makes a logical narrative. I tried "The Hobbit" and it started with me having tea with Gandalf the wizard. There was a knock at the front door so I opened it and outside was Gandalf the wizard!

I wonder which model is this based on.

I've tried quite some models and so far I've only seen two that are good at keeping continuity: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Sonnet 3.7 (both with reasoning on). These two are also exceptionally good[0] at adding plot twists that aren't in the prompt.

[0]: by "my expectation of LLM" standard, not by the standard of bestseller genre fiction.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns any book into a text adventure game

#90
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a false assumption that other people cannot enjoy what you're talking about unless they've experienced it themselves. If one has good storytelling skills and a solid theory of mind (concern for the listener), almost anything can be interesting. Even dreams. I also disagree with your conclusion that an activity only has a point if discussed with others. A good deal of the best experiences in my life are…

I neither made this assumption nor the conclusion.

Then what is your goal in pointing out, "People are not even interested in each others dreams most of the time"?
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