Show HN: Demo of my web game about social persuasion (talktomehuman.com)

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091379

Congrats on launching the demo version!

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.

I found it exceedingly frustrating. It seems to be well made, but a simulation of doing things I hate. Good job, I guess?

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.

    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. 

Really enjoyed this game. Well done!

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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!

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.

Fascinating game that is unlike anything I've played. Nice work!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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That's cute. Reminds me of those old Flash dating sims on Newgrounds.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Stop trying to steal clips of my voice

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)

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?