I'm still surprised people are not writing their own READMEs. It's the first impression anyone gets on your project, and having it be full of Claudeisms shows you just don't really care. It's also a pretty good indicator that the entire thing is slopware, so I guess it's a useful signal there.
> It is made to sit in a split next to your AI agents. They can send you short messages that show up in the game, so you can play while they work.
> 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."
wow, i didn't know about NetHack, that's pretty damn cool!
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
that's a good point, actually. the features that differentiate terminactory from.. say, factorio, is the agent telegrams, the lore behind the game (optional, it's a factory game, with a lot to discover story-wise, in-game), and some other QOL features ("blueprint" that let you copy paste sections, with mirroring and rotating, unlockable on the early game; selecting a large area and deleting it, and a few more)
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
that's fair, i shouldn't have made that point. this game has a command agents can use to message you in-game so you don't need to leave the experience (and is meant to be played alongside agents), has a browser with fake forums, sites, wikis, and a whole bunch of lore, and that's about it.
First of all, iron and copper are typically the initial components you build things out of but then the complexity rises as you progress through the game. I've played a lot of Satisfactory and the mid game is all about processing oil and coal, then later on you are doing things like producing batteries out of sulphur and aluminum byproduct.
But perhaps more importantly, these games are ultimately highly abstracted from real industrial processes and concepts like "iron" and "copper" are just arbitrary ingredient names. From a game design perspective, you have to ask if the industrial process that the player emulates is actually fun and if they are solving compelling puzzles (or whatever experience you want the player to have). You can go a long way with just a few basic inputs, and iron/coal/copper are intuitive to grasp based on the real-life analogy.
There are, but I was trying to make the game for a more general audience. I'd be willing to add another game model with more realism, and some more processes too, if you'd be interested.
I just don't see much appeal for such games.. If it's liked substantially by a few people, I'll add it as a gamemode, otherwise it feels like catering to a non-existent crowd :/
but, now that you mention it, I'll look into adding it soon, thanks!
I’m currently vibe-coding a game for myself inspired by prison architect + workers & resources - it’s about a fictional 1940s-1980s Soviet plutonium production complex where you have to manage… workers, resources, political goodwill, quotas, and accidents. Modelled are Alpha, Beta, gamma and Neutron radiation, effects on workers like in rimworld.
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.
well, that is an INSANE amount of praise, thank you so much! but yes, the ASCII art was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a few other games :D
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.
I'm a big idle / automation games aficionado but this just doesn't work in the terminal, sorry. It's not visually pleasing, the UI is simply too busy to work well there.
i've added presets now, "calm" might fit your style. it hides the panes, shifts to small pane mode, sticks to ASCII, auto-closes the sidebar graph, and keeps telegram arrivals as notes.
dense is still the default, and custom lets you pick and choose whatever you want.
i hope this roughly reflects what you wanted, if not, please tell me if there's anything wrong that i can fix, i'd appreciate that a bunch! thanks!
If it runs fast and low resource, it could be a nice testbed for agent architectures. I'm thinking old-school planners, genetic programming, ML techniques, etc.
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.
that's a good idea, I could definitely see this and games like this as agent benchmarks, like an ARC-AGI but it rotates amongst strategy / long-horizon sandbox games, so we don't have benchmaxxing..
It's a good direction though, I'll take this into consideration in future versions :D
I'm still surprised people are not writing their own READMEs. It's the first impression anyone gets on your project, and having it be full of Claudeisms shows you just don't really care. It's also a pretty good indicator that the entire thing is slopware, so I guess it's a useful signal there.
i'm sorry that was your impression, i'll write a good, human README over the weekend. if you still think it's slop, then, that's fair, but yeah
yep. i've rewritten the README in my voice. Hope you like it!
I wonder is the lore AI generated as well? Or written by you?
> It is made to sit in a split next to your AI agents. They can send you short messages that show up in the game, so you can play while they work.
> 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."
I guess it's a variation on jwz's old aphorism:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
wow, i didn't know about NetHack, that's pretty damn cool!
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
It's an interesting game, I love the hacker-like look to it. But is the only value proposition here that it runs in a terminal?
To me, it could be interesting for ~10 minutes, and I'd then prefer playing a game like Factorio.
that's a good point, actually. the features that differentiate terminactory from.. say, factorio, is the agent telegrams, the lore behind the game (optional, it's a factory game, with a lot to discover story-wise, in-game), and some other QOL features ("blueprint" that let you copy paste sections, with mirroring and rotating, unlockable on the early game; selecting a large area and deleting it, and a few more)
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
Blueprints with those features are a major feature of Factorio.
that's fair, i shouldn't have made that point. this game has a command agents can use to message you in-game so you don't need to leave the experience (and is meant to be played alongside agents), has a browser with fake forums, sites, wikis, and a whole bunch of lore, and that's about it.
sorry for the blatant autocorrect artifacts, typing on my phone rn :/
Comparing a small TUI open-source game to Factorio?
Those aren't competitors.
Why every factory game is about mining/smelting iron and copper? Aren't there more intersting industrial processes?
First of all, iron and copper are typically the initial components you build things out of but then the complexity rises as you progress through the game. I've played a lot of Satisfactory and the mid game is all about processing oil and coal, then later on you are doing things like producing batteries out of sulphur and aluminum byproduct.
But perhaps more importantly, these games are ultimately highly abstracted from real industrial processes and concepts like "iron" and "copper" are just arbitrary ingredient names. From a game design perspective, you have to ask if the industrial process that the player emulates is actually fun and if they are solving compelling puzzles (or whatever experience you want the player to have). You can go a long way with just a few basic inputs, and iron/coal/copper are intuitive to grasp based on the real-life analogy.
There are, but I was trying to make the game for a more general audience. I'd be willing to add another game model with more realism, and some more processes too, if you'd be interested. I just don't see much appeal for such games.. If it's liked substantially by a few people, I'll add it as a gamemode, otherwise it feels like catering to a non-existent crowd :/
but, now that you mention it, I'll look into adding it soon, thanks!
I’m currently vibe-coding a game for myself inspired by prison architect + workers & resources - it’s about a fictional 1940s-1980s Soviet plutonium production complex where you have to manage… workers, resources, political goodwill, quotas, and accidents. Modelled are Alpha, Beta, gamma and Neutron radiation, effects on workers like in rimworld.
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 sounds interesting, if you publish it, i'll definitely try it out!
Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress's original ASCII UI
well, that is an INSANE amount of praise, thank you so much! but yes, the ASCII art was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a few other games :D
Arguably it might not be. :p
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.
Nice! I wonder if you could have an option to use the icons available in Nerd Fonts in addition to plain ascii?
that sounds doable, i'll add it as an opt-in for the next batch of changes. thanks for the idea!
it's done and live, you can check it out now! it's a setting in the settings pane (accessible via g)
wonder if you could turn a custom fond into map pieces
this is cool, thank you! A bit too busy for my old brain but I like the game. Good job!
Pretty neat looking! I'll need to try it out on Monday ;)
i hope you enjoy it! it'll be an excellent monday, that's for sure ;)
I'm a big idle / automation games aficionado but this just doesn't work in the terminal, sorry. It's not visually pleasing, the UI is simply too busy to work well there.
i've added presets now, "calm" might fit your style. it hides the panes, shifts to small pane mode, sticks to ASCII, auto-closes the sidebar graph, and keeps telegram arrivals as notes.
dense is still the default, and custom lets you pick and choose whatever you want.
i hope this roughly reflects what you wanted, if not, please tell me if there's anything wrong that i can fix, i'd appreciate that a bunch! thanks!
sorry, could you give some issues you had? i'll make a few alternative UIs, but personally it felt visually pleasing for me
If it runs fast and low resource, it could be a nice testbed for agent architectures. I'm thinking old-school planners, genetic programming, ML techniques, etc.
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.
that's a good idea, I could definitely see this and games like this as agent benchmarks, like an ARC-AGI but it rotates amongst strategy / long-horizon sandbox games, so we don't have benchmaxxing..
It's a good direction though, I'll take this into consideration in future versions :D
hard stop when I see/hear any AI use