I still exist
OH HEY! I remember when I set this email list up, I promised that I would post sometimes, and then not for a while, and then again after a long period of silence, and so I feel pretty confident that I am fulfilling my promise to you right now.
Hey! I hope you are still alive. I am.
I have a projects I would like to tell you about! If you liked my previous projects, you will probably like this!!
Fiction Quest: Ben’s new MOO-like text adventure game
My latest project is an ai-assisted text adventure game called FICTION QUEST. This is a pretty exciting project for me, as I have tried several times in the past to build multi-user adventure chat environments before, but the application of recent language model and image generation technologies really opens up some new doors.
Fiction Quest started out as an experiment where I was chatting with an AI-powered goat character. It was way too much fun and I started posting about it on the socials and people were interested, so I decided to push it further and see if I could connect the goat and other characters into an environment like the ol’ interactive fiction games of yore.
It worked shockingly well — so well that the people I showed it to ended up playing for hours on end. So in typical Ben fashion, I poured a bunch of nights and weekends into fleshing out the game into something a bit more real. The game world now consists of three distinct zones, a dozen AI-powered characters, and all sorts of weird situations to explore. There’s a cyberpunk corpo district, a desert wasteland, a spooky underground. And bars. Lots of cool bars.
To play, you login to a web-based chat room. The world is described in text, and you can interact with it by issuing commands or questions. Other players are in the chat room with you, along with NPCs who have their own agendas and rudimentary memories. You can gather an inventory of supplies and set out on adventure, or just sit around and chat withe bartender.
It is kind of an amazing experience - like having a lucid dream. The AI can guide you to some weird stuff, but you can also push back and create a world of your own imagination. The power of the machine language generation mixed with your ideas and the pre-built game world characters and locations has surprising results!
To support the development of the game world, I have launched a Patreon. Joining the Patreon gets you access to the game world 24/7 as well as regular posts about the development process and my observations working with the LLM and image generation technologies.
Plus, I made cool glittery stickers… and I may or may not be working on a set of limited edition trading cards. I CAN’T HELP MYSELF.
Learn more about Fiction Quest and maybe sign up for the Patreon at https://fiction.quest/
To get a sense of what the game is like, you can see a feed of the images generated by gameplay. https://feed.fiction.quest/
Or you can check out my curated selection of images on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fiction.quest/
A FEW MORE THINGS
It has been a while since I last emailed, so here’s a quick tldr of things you may have missed:
I am 100% off Twitter. You can now find me at HACKERS TOWN living my best life. I post a lot, you should follow me on your own Mastodon instance.
I also built my own single-user Fediverse server called SHUTTLECRAFT - if you are looking for a way to host your own social, this is a great option! It can run easily on Glitch. I run my instance on a $5/mo. You can follow me there too - social.benbrown.com
And if you somehow missed this, there is also HAPPY NET BOX, a retro social experience based around the arcane FINGER and GOPHER protocols. You can get an account for free and post weird ascii art for people to see. I post to my happy net box profile almost daily, and have done so for months. In fact there are 60,000 words hidden in my archive! Are you following along? Open a terminal and type `finger benbrown@happynetbox.com` to get the latest.
ALRIGHT Y’ALL
I appreciate you and hope you are doing well. The theme of the projects I am working on these days is “The internet is a toxic hole and the world is not much better, lets try brick by brick to restore what used to be great about it.” You have a choice of how and where you spend your time online! Find a community that you love that is not owned by a megacorp and invest in it!!