[HN Gopher] Show HN: Demo of my web game about social persuasion
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Show HN: Demo of my web game about social persuasion
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!
Author : mbforbes
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-12-21 18:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (talktomehuman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (talktomehuman.com)
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091379
|
| Congrats on launching the demo version!
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Show HN: Talk to Me Human - my game about social persuasion_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091379 - April 2024
| (52 comments)
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Thank you! And Happy Holidays!
| ddrcoder wrote:
| I played an earlier version of this game and I found it super
| compelling. Very different play experience from every other game
| I've seen. Fantastic application of LLMs.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I found it exceedingly frustrating. It seems to be well made, but
| a simulation of doing things I hate. Good job, I guess?
| mbforbes wrote:
| Hehe, I've been surprised how speaking makes the social
| pressure real. Thank you for the feedback, it makes me think I
| should add some more lighthearted challenges earlier.
| cbdhsjshs wrote:
| The timer is what gets me anxious.
|
| 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.
| mbforbes wrote:
| In case you're interested: there's an option in the
| settings to give yourself more time.
|
| 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?
| mbforbes wrote:
| Too late to edit, but I realized I should have mentioned: I'm
| happy to answer any questions, and field suggestions, about the
| tech stack or game design.
|
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I broke it. It appears to be stuck on this stage:
| 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.
|
| Or any speech for that matter. It just forever keeps displaying
| the generation symbol.
|
| Congrats. It has been fun enough to buy the full version.
| mbforbes wrote:
| Thank you so much for buying 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!
| noduerme wrote:
| Fun demo, nicely done! The visual and play style reminds me of
| "Eliza".
|
| 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?
| mbforbes wrote:
| Thank you, and thank you for the reference! I hadn't seen
| "Eliza," the emotional dashboard was really interesting /
| creepy / cool.
|
| 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!)
| althea_tx wrote:
| Really enjoyed this game. Well done!
| mbforbes wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words!
| bturtel wrote:
| I think this has a TON of potential. Situations like these are
| very non-obvious and anxiety-inducing for lots of people, so if
| you can make this a way for people to gain proficiency and
| confidence at navigating tricky social interactions, it could be
| a very powerful value prop. My only feedback would be that it
| took too long to get into the first challenge - lots of
| instructions / introduction / scene setting. Well done!
| mbforbes wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words, vision, and feedback! Will be
| thinking more along the direction of true 'life situation
| rehearsal.'
|
| 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)?
| path_care wrote:
| I like teaching by doing the best. Once I started playing the
| game I felt hooked so getting them to that first speaking
| opportunity will draw them in as they learn.
| bturtel wrote:
| Yea, I think so - I could imagine this being really
| streamlined by just dropped me immediately into a
| conversation, with maybe the goal just written on a screen
| somewhere - no setup, no storyline, etc. I guess it just
| depends if most of your users are there for a gameplay
| experience vs a "practice" experience.
| layer8 wrote:
| First impressions:
|
| - 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.
| mbforbes wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback!
|
| 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.
| astroalex wrote:
| Fascinating game that is unlike anything I've played. Nice work!
| nousernamegiven wrote:
| This is so cool! What a wonderful project. The art was great and
| the audio too!
|
| 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.
| satellite2 wrote:
| Maybe on mobile it could allow slightly more time to type?
|
| 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?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| The dialog in the game is incredibly plain. There's almost no
| emotion to any of the spoken dialog. The art is very off putting
| and lacks any cohesion. The "talk back" mechanic never seemed to
| actually pay attention to what I said.
|
| I think you could have spent the same time sitting down with a
| writer and an artist and actually made something much more
| interesting.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| This was great, I felt social anxiety and found myself getting
| flustered just like talking to cable company support. Could
| really see the potential as use in exposure therapy to overcome
| phone anxiety.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| This had the same issue duolingo's speech recognition gives me:
| single-syllable single-word audio is almost never picked up. The
| game starts with a yes/no question, locking progression behind
| this bug. Maybe my phone is too old.
| Animats wrote:
| That's cute. Reminds me of those old Flash dating sims on
| Newgrounds.
| hecanjog wrote:
| I had a really good time interacting with this, from the
| standpoint of feeling like I was being heard without putting in
| special effort (I just spoke like I would meeting a new person,
| not trying to interact with a phone menu system) but otherwise
| early on I got creeped out by what seemed like testing an
| advertising feature. The narrator tried to get me to buy a fake
| something randomly after otherwise very terse interactions. I
| played it through to the end even though after the first try I
| failed and thought oh no I don't know how to interact with
| people, maybe I don't know how to interact with humans, etc, etc.
| The next time I tried I played through to the end easily. Be
| careful with presenting something that seems like an authority on
| a subject like _social interaction_. How can there be an
| authority?
| oakashes wrote:
| This really feels like a glimpse at where video games are going,
| I felt like I could really enter into the character's role
| because what I said actually affected the dialog.
|
| 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.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| This looks really cool but anyone else also paranoid about
| dumping voice signature to random site?
|
| 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.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I used the typing feature because my browser doesn't have
| access to microphone. Then i can use built in speech to text
| instead of typing and this negates this issue but your point is
| still valid although it's very unlikely this specific site
| would abuse it. The again, what payment method do they use? XD
| Epitaque wrote:
| Incredibly cool. I enjoyed playing it for a bit but was not huge
| on some of the characters or art. It'd be cool if you added a
| level editor so we can add our own scenarios
| dash2 wrote:
| I think it's a great idea, but I felt a bit uncomfortable being
| asked to "say anything" to persuade people. In the first two
| scenes, I would have just been honest in real life.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Stop trying to steal clips of my voice
| thomashop wrote:
| I made a similar experiment using the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
| Galaxy theme.
|
| 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)
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| This was fun! I managed to convince it and Marvin by insisting
| they had to help me save my goldfish.
| com2kid wrote:
| I promised him I'd push him out the top floor window.
|
| Very different approaches... :D
| xandrius wrote:
| I role played being an inspector and floor numbers were now
| inverted. Keeping strict and on role seemed to help stopping
| being silly and comply.
| woolion wrote:
| Really captures the nowhere-going in circles dialogue feel of
| the original!
|
| 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!"}
| dmarcos wrote:
| Well done! Love to see innovation in Web games. Biz model also
| interesting. I didn't see a login button. how do you identify
| paying users and store progress?
| spacesanjeet wrote:
| I like how it tells users that firefox doesn't support speech
| recognition.
| nbgoodall wrote:
| The mic wouldn't setup on Safari or Brave, but after trying
| Chrome... this is great! Nicely done, thoroughly enjoyed playing.
| woolion wrote:
| Interesting! I released JOBifAI which has as main gameplay
| challenge to persuade a boss in a job interview. I struggled to
| describe this aspect in my different pitches for the game, social
| persuasion is a great term, and I believe it's the main feature
| that is opened by AI.
|
| 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.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3248650/JOBifAI/
| graso wrote:
| Cool! Do you plan to release other languages other than English?
| superv0 wrote:
| This is so cool! I've never played on a website like this before.
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(page generated 2024-12-22 23:01 UTC)