Show HN: Town – Discord in a pixel town where the NPCs have skills(github.com)
github.com
Show HN: Town – Discord in a pixel town where the NPCs have skills
https://github.com/redplanethq/town
3 comments
Why all the towns? You must really like the format
Also thinking deeper, I think your question also is very broad on aspects to answer.
Technically in times where there is a gathering of ai and people I think a single chat surface is not the right experience but yeah having a UI saying agents as tabs felt tooo boring and actually fed up.
Just wanted to keep it fun but at the same time can we elevate the experience when there is a common surface where a bunch of ai-npcs and people can meet.
I hope it answers, happy to dig more in a different direction if you felt I understood it wrong
Just wanted to keep it fun but at the same time can we elevate the experience when there is a common surface where a bunch of ai-npcs and people can meet.
I hope it answers, happy to dig more in a different direction if you felt I understood it wrong
yeah a question with which I started :)
I definitely love the format, but the real reason is each town comes with it's own creative story, theme and interaction rhythm. I first thought about making one town that held them all which I wanted to have for myself or say my own town. But then later thought different people want to have their own representation of it, since it's english, different themes and all about creativity it has no bounds.
In the hindsight I also wanted to figure out which experiences it improves vs which it decorates. Curious what you felt when you experienced it.
I definitely love the format, but the real reason is each town comes with it's own creative story, theme and interaction rhythm. I first thought about making one town that held them all which I wanted to have for myself or say my own town. But then later thought different people want to have their own representation of it, since it's english, different themes and all about creativity it has no bounds.
In the hindsight I also wanted to figure out which experiences it improves vs which it decorates. Curious what you felt when you experienced it.
Agents have become my initial brainstorm partner for a lot of stuff — sub-agents to counter my own thinking, role-playing a specific person, grounding them in a specific knowledge so they refer instead of guess. I started turning my claude-code into this pattern and it worked well enough that I wanted to see if I turn into a fun shareable thing where other people can also talk to.
It's a small pixel map of buildings. You walk in, step into any building, and talk to the npcs who live there.
Each NPC is an AI agent with its own personality (voice, backstory, what they care about) and a skillset (tools like memory, web search, writing docs). The personality makes them fun to talk to; the tools make them able to actually do something.
Multiplayer/Group discussions: Real people wander the same map. If someone else is in your town you see them walking around and can chat live. Step into a building together and press G to open a shared chat between the humans and AI avatars in that room.
The engineering bit I like most: each NPC is a separate agent with scoped tool permissions. The author decides which tools each one gets — a shopkeeper can hand out inventory, a detective can issue a Case Closed card, a barista just talks.
A few towns I've built:
- AI Startup Town: get in a room with NPCs of famous investors — Paul Graham, Garry Tan, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell. Pitch your idea, stress-test your plan, build your startup doc.
- Murder Mystery Town: Iris Bell is dead. Talk to the NPCs, catch someone in a contradiction, figure out who did it, and report back to Detective Reeve to close the case.
- Roast Town: get roasted, or learn the fundamentals of roasting.
- CORE Town: the sampler — one town that shows off everything. Pitch Garry Tan at YC House, stand trial at Trial of You, get worked over by a noir detective, get roasted. Best place to start.
You can build your own town too, and it's open source. A town is just a JSON + MDX folder — a buildings list, one .mdx per AI avatar (frontmatter = identity, body = system prompt) — then town deploy from the CLI. There's also a claude plugin that builds the whole thing in one shot from a rough description.
Guest mode, no signup:
Startup: https://town.getcore.me/startup?invite_code=7EQMH0
Murder Mystery: https://town.getcore.me/murder-mystery?invite_code=S85S24
Roast: https://town.getcore.me/roast-town?invite_code=0MXN93
CORE Town: https://town.getcore.me/core-town?invite_code=H4C0TZ
Full list: https://town.getcore.me/explore
Source: https://github.com/RedPlanetHQ/town
Rather fun project overall. Honestly I have been thinking a lot about how community engagement is changing with agents and this felt like a good way. It's a very raw shot. Kindly share your thoughts and feedback.