Show HN: Yesterday's Bread – a modern MUD with AI NPCs and a personalised novel

[bridgettegraham]

Hi HN — I'm Bridgette, a software engineer in South Africa. Over the last year I rebuilt a classic-style MUD from the ground up on a modern stack (Postgres, server-authoritative simulation, generative-AI NPCs that keep schedules and remember conversations, dynamic weather, item decay, the works). The twist is that when you finish the single-player arc, the game compiles your run into a personalised PDF novel — your name, your race, your choices, your ending. I'd love technical feedback on any of it: the simulation, the NPC design, the localisation engine (it's bilingual English/Afrikaans), or just the idea of "the game writes you a book about you" as a finishing reward. Happy to answer questions.

[vunderba]

Nice job. I think you'd get more traction if you allowed people to play as guests, with some kind of limited tier system so they don't exceed your credit budget (assuming the NPCs are driven by an LLM). A lot of people, especially on Hacker News, are very sign-up averse and will bounce as soon as they see they have to create an account.

I also like the idea of converting the story afterward. I'm not sure if you're already doing this, but it might be nice that, when the story wraps up, you let players choose to convert the final PDF into first, second, or third person.

Also tangentially related, but have a look at AI Dungeon it was a pretty early attempt to create an LLM-driven text adventure game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon

[bridgettegraham]

Thanks for the comment! I like your idea about changing the voice to first/second/third, and I am also considering full translation - this has not yet been built. The game is built with locales in mind, supporting English and Afrikaans (my native language) out of the box and I plan to add more locales, but I still need to investigate this.

Oh I remember AI Dungeon - I have played it myself :-)