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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Putting the finishing touches on my LLM based town simulator. Once it's finished I'll have it simulate 4 hours in the town every 2 hours in reality.

It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.

Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.

I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!

An only slightly buggy build is at https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html

Importantly, I am aiming to have everything (except voice gen) working on a small model that can be ran locally.

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Nice idea, but right now the villagers mostly say some variation on "I eagerly await the valiant hero's return!". Beside the fact that no villagers would ever speak so formally, this seems to fall into the standard fantasy problem that the normal people in the world only exist to further the hero's agency. Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?

> Could you give the villagers a sense of their own agency, meaning that they have lives of their own that would continue whether the hero returns or not?

Yeah I'm currently considering working that in.

Right now existing game AI techniques can manage giving NPCs a daily routine, and I'm trying to focus on demonstrating something new, VS another solution for an already solved problem. But having NPCs just talk about the hero is boring. I'll likely get around to adding private life stuff for each NPC before I do an announcement and share the project more broadly.

I eagerly await the Skyrim mod!

Jokes aside, this is interesting because I have thought about this since the first time I killed the dragon outside of Whiterun. There is a brief change with the guards nearby where they are wowwed by your feat, but some of the standard NPC responses sneak in and make the immersive aspect of the game shaky, at best.

I always thought, overtime, the honeymoon phase of a hero's deeds would wear off, and the villagers would swing more into a negative mindset, asking things like "who is going to clean this up?" or "how will we be compensated for damage to our homes?" etc. Community disruption tends to devolve into a lot of cynicism about the people in charge, in my experience with everything from natural disasters (obvious negatives) to new urban shopping centers (less obvious negatives). Regardless of what actually changed to disrupt the community, eventually it is perceived as the source of problems.

I'm not a psychologist or civic engineer, so I am not sure if there is a name for the concept I am referring to.

It would be great to give each of the NPC's their own character. For example, some of the NPC's could have a grudge against the hero for reasons of their own. They could be cheering against him for causing such a ruckus in their village, or maybe some "Monday morning quarterback" happening, thinking they could have handled the problem much better than he did. I think an LLM may be pretty good at coming up with some ideas. Or maybe even make it a bit tongue-in-cheek and have some of the NPC's be fans of the hero's enemies.

I'm thinking of going full on soap opera complete with a love triangle.

Visitors need some sort of vested interest in what is going on.

When properly prompted, even GPT3.5 can write compelling short stories[1], but I'm using such tiny models for this that I'll have to do a lot of guidance to keep things interesting.

[1] IMHO it was better at this when GPT3.5 first released, it was able to do some awesome stuff!

Having played with the demo a bit I think it's a couple of things:

1 - If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.

2 - There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.

> If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.

During one iteration of testing the NPCs decided to throw a party for the hero and they all congregated in the tavern. That was 100% awesome and if I can hit that type of WOW factor more often I think it'll all feel magical.

> There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.

This is just a tech demo so I'm not sure how much I want to put into it. Especially since the end goal is to get a recognized and get a job!

This sounds nuts…and exciting. Makes me want to tinker with small models, what a neat concept.

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