Posted by snipedbywifi 8 hours ago
I'm snipedbywifi (https://gitlab.com/snipedbywifi), and i've been working on terminactory. Please try it out if you'd like to play a cozy factory game while waiting for long agent tasks to finish!
The game is a factory game (overused niche, i know xD), but runs in your terminal. Reason i built it? glad you asked: So basically, it started off with me wanting a terminal-native factory game. Me and the modern 5.5 claude models made a base for the game that I liked, and then i went ham adding features / fixing some minor flaws (like adding claude code hooks so you recieve "telegrams" [the agent's responses], so you can review progress directly in-game). (yes, I had heavy AI assistance, disclaimer!!!)
Right now, the game has basic factory features you'd expect from a game like this (build stuff, delete stuff, measure how much you're earning, basic selection tools), along with a few more.. "unexpected" features. This includes a fake in-game browser that has a wiki, fake forums, some fun bits of lore, some more lore, a LOT more lore, and a research graph that shows how many items or how much RP (research points) you'd need to unlock something, and some more QOL features.
If anyone actually has this issue / want of a terminal-based game that runs alongside your agents so you don't doomscroll, do you have any suggestions, or additional ideas I could add?
It's hosted on GitLab, soo, that's one additional thing i'd like to mention
Thanks for reading!! snipedbywifi
(p.s. first HN post lol) (p.s. p.s. there's a lot of hidden lore in the game, so.. lore-divers? you might like it?)
> Agent messages
> Your AI agents can message you inside the game. A message costs the agent only the words in it, and nothing prints on success. Messages wait while the game is closed.
It's kinda amazing how the ancient "local mail" technology keeps getting reinvented, you know, and reintegrated inside the gameplay? NetHack had its its "mail demon" since... (googles) version 1.0.2, in April 1985 — the creature would spawn in the game, deliver you a scroll of mail, and vanish. And apparently, it's still in use nowadays? "On public servers such as nethack.alt.org, a user may observe other users' games and communicate with them by sending mail."
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
and yeah, genuinely insane how we came full-circle lol... on terminactory it uses claude code hooks, with an optional "tfac msg" command (tried to minimize token usage, hence the hook)
but yeah, the netHack thing is pretty cool, guess you learn something new every day? xD
To me, it could be interesting for ~10 minutes, and I'd then prefer playing a game like Factorio.
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
but, now that you mention it, I'll look into adding it soon, thanks!
Will be gpl 3.0 and I plan to release a playable 0.1 on GitHub. I care mostly about historical accuracy of radiation incidents and factory issues at the intersection of nuclear engineering & political issues akin to Paper’s please.
I’m afraid to publish it because I despise the amount of AI slop out there. I just want to tickle my need for a historical plutonium production management simulator.
That was CP437 squeezed into a terminal emulator that ran sixteen or so OpenGL calls per character. I spent a couple months building a shim library to optimise it, before Toady let me fix the game. :p
Real terminal output ought to be faster, but don’t sleep on Kitty.
Especially integrating planners or logic-based approaches with ML models. The old architectures for StarCraft were great at building and micro-managing units but terrible at assessing or adapting to enemy strategy. Hybrid architectures can address that.
Games like yours, esp different styles or requirements, can be used to prove how well the techniques generalize.
It's a good direction though, I'll take this into consideration in future versions :D
It's part of the in-game lore.
> Lovely, a rate limit.
Gitlab rate limits anonymous users. If you sign in, you won't have an issue.