grontown VS endbasic

Hey HN,

Michael and Scott here. We’re open-sourcing an interactive murder mystery featuring LLM-driven character agents. Solve the mystery by finding clues, taking notes, and interrogating agents. They all have distinct motives, personality, and can impact the game in different ways (attacking you, running away, etc). Try it out, it’s pretty fun!

We’re also open-sourcing the framework that we used to make and refine the agents. The goal is to create an intuitive interface for storytellers to create, debug, and test game agents. We then take those game agents and expose an API beyond just chat - such as actions, player guardrails, emotional queries, etc.

We’re not done yet - there are a lot more features coming on the way: scenario-based agent evals, agent-storyline consistency management, automatic agent generation, etc.

We would love to hear your feedback.

Thanks!

[0] https://github.com/mluogh/grontown

I can confirm that writing a terminal is fun, for the reasons mentioned in the article: it’s easy to get “self-hosting”, but then the possibilities are endless :)

In my case, this was about creating the terminal for EndBASIC (https://www.endbasic.dev/). I wanted to mix text and graphics in the same console, so I had to ditch Xterm.js and create my own thing. It was really exciting to see graphics rendering mix with text “just fine” when I was able to render the first line.

I tried to set up a Raspberry Pi and configured it to boot into a simple window manager with DosBox full screen by default. I taught my kids to launch games within that and they learned the very basics… but it didn’t stick: they haven’t really gained any interest in how to do other stuff in the shell.

Anyway: check (my own) https://www.endbasic.dev/ which I’ve written precisely for the situation you describe :) You would actually have to /write/ the games first though!

Slightly buried: Apache 2.0, written in Rust, https://github.com/endbasic/endbasic/

Definitely an interesting attempt to cut through layers of abstraction and make something that lets people make the computer do useful/interesting things. No idea how well they realize that vision, of course, but good idea.

Or you could use https://www.endbasic.dev/

Somebody else brought it up in a separate comment, but because you specifically ask about the Raspberry, I'll mention EndBASIC (https://www.endbasic.dev/) here again :)

Supporting this platform has been a primary goal of mine, and in fact, one of the features (GPIO) only works on the Raspberry Pi today :) But there is a long road ahead. My vision is to create a minimal Linux image that boots straight into EndBASIC, and extend EndBASIC to give you more control of the Pi's hardware. The idea is to truly mimic the old C64 experience, but leveraging the power of modern hardware / infrastructure.

Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing.

But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in this context :) I’ve been building it precisely as a way to understand everything that’s going on (although it’s still far from fulfilling that promise).

Also, buried in the article is a reference to the https://10print.org/ book. I recently came across it at HPB and it has been a pretty entertaining read. Couldn’t believe there was so much to write about such a simple little program!