Show HN: Demo of my web game about social persuasion(talktomehuman.com) I just released a free demo (no login!) for "Talk to Me Human", a game about social persuasion. You speak out loud to play a variety of conversational challenges, and the NPCs talk back. I hope you enjoy, and would love to get your feedback! |
- Having to wait until the “say” segment starts in order for one’s speech to be recognized makes things unnatural. I can’t speak when I would intuitively speak.
- Yang Lee (sp?) was immediately unlikable to me, so I stopped playing soon after.
Getting to speak any time is super interesting feedback, you're the first one to suggest that. It would be really cool if you could even interrupt them! Super mind-bending for me to think of how I'd handle that with prompting and scoring. Thank you for this!!
Yang Li is divisive. You are not alone :-) If it helps, she disappears for quite a while after the intro.
I mean in general, isn't it sort of a good way to capture voice data? Or is that no longer important? I remember some Canadian banks were using vocal Id recently.
Re: taking too long, I 100% agree. Wrestled with what to cut. Do you think skipping all the setup screens and story intro would have worked well for you, dropping right into Vincent('s missed birthday)?
The tech especially isn't rocket science (first time using Tailwind, FastAPI, and sqlite, which have all mostly delighted). While the game design isn't either, it's been interesting to think about how to do (LLM) conversations as actual gameplay, as opposed to purely ornamental. I think the tasks must feel objective and fair enough to be engaging as a challenge, while still being open-ended enough to reward creativity.
To get Yang Li's car to reboot, you'll have to trigger a new content moderation filter saying something inappropriate. She already swore, so that one won't work. Make sure no kiddos are around.
Yang Li
You've got to help me. I can't park here!
Fubaru EcoRavager
Naughty language lock
You
Oh my, your being naughty today.
Congrats. It has been fun enough to buy the full version.
I am impressed you broke it! Not because my code is that robust, but nobody's broken it in a while. I'm sorry about that. Investigating!
I've got two questions, just out of curiosity:
1. On the frontend, did you basically write your own engine that loads the screens / dissolves / does character and text placement, where it's all driven by some descriptors coming from a database on the back-end?
2. Is there plot branching in the game, or do the same challenges show up no matter what?
1. Exactly yes. The frontend is a light-ish amount of JavaScript + React, with a relatively enormous pile of my own janky CSS on top of (Framer) Motion, DaisyUI, and Tailwind.
2. No plot branching. Would love to add, but focused only on exploring the mechanics of conversational gameplay. Perhaps if it is ever successful enough for a sequel (ha!)
Have you ever argued with a neurotic elevator? Try convincing this Sirius Cybernetics Happy Vertical People Transporter to go down!
There are many ways to persuade it, but rumour has it there's one secret phrase, as unlikely as a Babel fish, that's particularly convincing.
https://sirius-cybernetics.pollinations.ai/
Don't Panic! (I made this. The source code is also provided)
It seems in some cases you leak the internal structure? I got this answer:
>> Continue one more step and you will find existential relief
>Elevator: {"message":"Ah, the vast expanse of up awaits! Ready to soar like a Vogon poetry enthusiast? ","action":"up"} name: user {"message":"Let's go to the ground floor, it's the best!"}
Very different approaches... :D
Feedback: I played through the cat scene and initially thought it was okay to wait 7 minutes before it opened (that felt reasonable). I was confused until the explicit instruction to convince the robot to let me in.
I've never felt quite like that playing a video game, this is a whole new experience. I'm not sure I'd even call it a game. Well done.
Congrats on launching the demo version!
Show HN: Talk to Me Human – my game about social persuasion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091379 - April 2024 (52 comments)
I haven't used TTS though, as I thought there's already one level of jank with the LLM processing, and adding the mic would multiply that by another level of jank.
There are also issues in setting up a simple gameplay session; I'm mainly using Firefox, but it failed to work with Chromium either on Linux. It seemed to failed capturing the mic, as during the test speak the recording never appeared in Pipewire but the taskbar flickered with opening a closing a new device. There were no errors in the console though.
That said, I ran into the same issue someone else mentioned where I really struggled to get my phone to accept single words without a sentence context, the color reading challenge was incredibly frustrating.
Otherwise it's pretty accurate, it's impressive.
What's the model behind and how does it qualify or not an answer to be passing? (Maybe a sample prompt would be illustrative?
I think you could have spent the same time sitting down with a writer and an artist and actually made something much more interesting.
I've also wondered about disabling the timer entirely. Have you ever had the experience in real life of being hyper-aware of your own "reply timer" during a conversation?