Hacker News

Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie(uncracked.city)

127 points by passkey1510 4 days ago | 69 comments

To give you some context on the project. I'm a solo founder and I use AI heavily in my work. The idea came from wanting players to discover cities. Each city has its own history, so every case is set in a real city with real public places. The crime and the people are on other hand invented. The part that I care most is the playable aspect of the game, a model plays the detective and must solve the case before it goes live.

As of today: it's free on Android, the iOS version is still waiting to be reviewed by Apple. It's available in six popular languages, but adding more languages is just a matter of time and demand.My long term vision if it takes off: weekly cases, private parties like a team-building escape game, an MCP so a game master can build their own scenario from ChatGPT or Claude, and maybe tourism offices since players travel the world.

[–] springtimesun 3 days ago

I’m just curious, are you old enough to have been inspired by Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? That was my first thought when reading this. I loved the computer game growing up and I wanted to be on the game show so bad.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Ha, I'm old enough but grew up in another part of the world (Vietnam) where the game show never made it there. This is the first time I've heard of it and it's interesting that my games share some ideas with it :)

[–] FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago

It started as a video game series all the way back in 1985

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

[–] Yoric 3 days ago

Oh gosh, the memories.

Also, it seems that you and I are dinosaurs.

[–] pathsjs 3 days ago

This looks very interesting, but the Italian copy on the website is poorly translated. For instance, nobody would write an explanation of what you need to do speaking to the player in the courtesy third person (Perquisisca i luoghi, Smascheri la bugia). Other sentences are written poorly, for instance "Nel gioco, «Segnalare» sotto una battuta ce la invia direttamente.". I haven't played the game, but if the translations are not up to par, it might be worth to publish it in English only for now

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you so much for your feedback. To be honest, I am a solo founder and dont speak Italian natively. So I have to base on the translation by AI completely. Once I have more players and more financial backup, I'll have those texts verified by native speaker.

[–] pathsjs 3 days ago

I think that passing the copy from your site to whatever recent model and asking if it sounds native would already catch a lot of issues

[–] Muromec 3 days ago

Just imagine that all the margins on your site are misaligned and text overflows the elements. Buttons still work, but it all looks ass.

That's the feeling bad translation gives.

[–] BrandoElFollito 3 days ago

The French one is not bad, except for some elemnts (namely the last sentence on the page which I did not understand). Funny coming from a French company, 10 km away from my place :)

[–] reactordev 4 days ago

When I was growing up there was a wonderfully made interactive “novel” game on early Macintosh called Sherlock Holmes. I’ve always wondered when we’ll get to a point where this can be done ad-hoc with any potential crime thriller. LA Noir introduced nuanced facial movements and dialog chains but I keep going back to that 1990s era Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

[–] gregsadetsky 4 days ago

This one? https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3485-sherlock-holmes-con...

[–] reactordev 3 days ago

Thats the one but you'll need to print the newspapers

[–] mikepurvis 3 days ago

People are definitely doing "free form" interactive fiction now, though I think the one that really interests me is classic style but with an LLM interface that makes the interaction less rigid, eg

https://intfiction.org/t/glulxe-with-llm-based-user-input-pa...

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. The case is fixed and ensured that it is solvable. I have multiple models to play it before going live. Only the conversation part is free, but it's guarded against the timeline and facts that each suspect knows. In that way, they can lie but can not change the story. By the way, I'm going to take a look at Consulting Detective

[–] reactordev 3 days ago

this is perfect!

[–] unintelligibled 4 days ago

You should probably put some better examples of writing in the first trailer, especially if the game involves a lot of reading. Asides from just sounding horribly bland, there's only two sentences of dialogue shown and the character says "honestly" in BOTH of them.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Hi, fair point. Indeed, the trailer will get a more careful review from now on ;)

[–] SamBam 3 days ago

The speech in the first sentence is weird too. "Detective? Salem? The Ashcom house!"

Maybe the AI thinks you're saying "Salaam" to the detective?

[–] nazgu1 3 days ago

I wonder if the cases in the game are created by AI as well. From my experiments LLMs outputs are rather mediocre, without "creativity", suspenses or plot twists

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you for your feedback. It's a fair point, LLM stories are often flat, I totally agree. And yes, the cases are written by AI, but through a pipeline rather than from scratch. I pick the idea and the city, then we develop the pitch together via Claude (I'm alone on this for now), then, only after my validation, the engine generates the case from it. After that, it makes sure the case is solvable by having multiple models play it as the detective, simulating different player profiles.

[–] Citizen_Lame 3 days ago

"It's a fair point"

At least don't use AI to reply. I get this whole game is entirely AI made and that's fine. But I just wonder how much effort did you put to make sure it's fun and human playable.

[–] mbrundle 3 days ago

This didn’t strike me as an AI reply, just OP trying to be considerate when replying. I would have said the same thing. (Also kudos to OP for building a game with NPCs managed by an LLM, I’ve been toying with this idea for a while too, ever since I saw an amazing Skyrim mod where you could freely chat to each NPC and learn their back stories etc). Would love to know more about what it takes to put this type of approach into production and how to constrain the discussions.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you. There's a harness layer that keeps each suspect from deviating from the current storyline. For the moment, I've deployed it to Lambda, where Haiku answers the questions in about 1–2 s.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

No, it's me replying, for the record. I read and reply to all the comments myself :) Honestly, that's a month of work with intensive use of AI. I always keep in mind that the game is for humans, so every step, every case is validated and played by me.

[–] noufalibrahim 3 days ago

Interesting idea. I was toying with a similar concept of a investigative journalist in a noirish town who's tasked with uncovering the secret identity of a vigilante.

It always struck me as absurd how obvious the fact that Clark Kent is Superman was to the whole audience. The characters in the story never seemed to understand it.

[–] fwip 3 days ago

I also used to think it was silly, but then I read another take - in-universe, Superman is known to be an alien, with a crystal fortress in Antartica or whatever - there's not much reason to believe that he has a secret identity at all. If you aren't already used to the premise of "superheroes have secret identities," it probably wouldn't occur to you that he'd have any reason to want to work in the reporter's office 8 hours a day and commute in traffic.

[–] noufalibrahim 2 days ago

Yeah. I suppose so but with heroes who wear masks, there is always the question who they are (Batman, Flash, Spider man etc.). Isn't there?

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Ha, interesting, the Clark Kent problem. And your journalist idea sounds fun, I'd try it. For long term vision, I've already prepared an MCP so that people can build their own stories and start a private game, for example.

[–] daluan 3 days ago

I have LLMs as players in a hidden-information word game. Models would often leak hidden info in their reasoning, so you had to filter what each side sees. Sometimes you have to be aware that these LLMs can be sneaky at times.

[–] fancyfredbot 3 days ago

The game is not bad. I tried it out and solved the Paris case. I liked the style and the locations.

I don't think I had to actually use the LLM chat at all though? It felt like suggested questions were all that was required.

There's an element of "just go everywhere and click on everything" too. For example having to return to a previous location to find someone now has a vital clue for you on how to solve a new puzzle. I'm not sure how you are supposed to know you should to back there. That kind of gameplay isn't that much fun.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you for playing it through. The Paris case is the first of a five-level training pack, it's meant to guide new players with a tutorial. The free questions really matter in the real cases after that, where the suggestions don't cover what you'll need. And very good point about going back to a location, will definitely fix it in the next version.

[–] patrickskim 3 days ago

haha very neat! Just curious how are you planning to make it free with the inference cost? Even with a luna or haiku its still a non zero cost to run per session.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Good point, I cover the inference cost myself for now, the running cost is a few thousand a year. There'll be premium features in the future, but that depends on reach and retention, and that'd be the second phase of the product.

[–] vigilantpuma 3 days ago

“Each suspect answers in their own voice. Some of them lie.”

EVERYBODY LIES.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Good catch, and that's by design. Someone lying doesn't necessarily mean they're the culprit. Some lies are not related to the case, some are.

[–] harsh_264 2 days ago

Seems really interesting, i am actually most excited about this side of AI. Like making your own mini simulation and having ai live out their lives or something along the lines of it

[–] carter-qadenza 3 days ago

MCP's in video games seems very interesting. I've played a lot of games with level builders and they can be insanely complicated. That could definitely cut down quite a bit and allow a lot more people to create cool stuff.

[–] barbazoo 3 days ago

I love this kind of game and I'm excited for AI to make them more individual and I really hope that sometime soon we'll get to a point where these AI-requests don't have to go to a datacenter but can be done locally on one's own machine.

[–] ghgr 3 days ago

Cool concept! It reminds me of the 1985 videogame Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. What a blast!

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you for your feedback. You're the third person to mention it today. And to be honest, I've never heard of it before. I'm gonna check it tonight ;)

[–] kevintayong 2 days ago

Very cool - happy to feature this in my AI and gaming newsletter. Let me know how I can contact you!

[–] krembo 3 days ago

I enjoy asking ai to play with me Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. You can ask for different variations, difficult levels and ask it to add images.

[–] cauenapier 3 days ago

My first thought as well! In less then a second, when I saw the Map with the airplane line I remembered Carmen Sandiego! What a good memory!

[–] JadeNB 3 days ago

Why does the Android app need to collect device ID?

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thanks for the feedback. It doesn't collect the hardware ID or the advertising ID. It collects the random player id the app is given on first launch, which lets you keep your progress without an account, and the push token if you allow notifications.

[–] loloquwowndueo 4 days ago

Talking to lying LLMs is what I do all day for work. Can’t imagine I’d want to do the same in my free time.

[–] hxugufjfjf 4 days ago

Same. Also, staring at a screen.

[–] mikepurvis 4 days ago

I wonder if you could do it all over voice, say while alone in the car.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Hi, half of it already works. You can question the suspects by voice and they answer in their own voices. There are still interactions that need the screen though, for now. A voice-only mode is a really fun idea.

[–] dmitrygr 3 days ago

Any reason this requires an app? A quick look suggests nothing at all that cannot be done on a simple website.

[–] wolfy1993 3 days ago

I had too much fun with this acting like a schizophrenic batman asking everyone who Harvey dent was and to SWEAR TO ME

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you very much for taking the time to test the game. Which case did you play, and did the suspects keep a straight face?

[–] vintermann 3 days ago

I think it's a bit unfortunate that you used AI for all the non-core elements of the game like the artwork. I do think that a game with judicious use of gen-AI allowing you to go "off the rails" has potential, but it's going to take a lot of hard work to make it OK and not chock full of all the AI clichés. It can be a good game, but you need to avoid not only to make it not look like slop, but avoid it BEING slop, and it's like you don't quite appreciate the problem when using AI for things you don't even need to use AI for.

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

I totally understand your point. But as I mentioned, I work alone on the project and that's the only way for now to have playable content. The very next thing, once I can hire someone, would be the artwork and the storytelling.

[–] anentropic 3 days ago

Nice idea! i'll give this a go tonight :)

I am curious - are you using on-device LLM for this?

[–] dgellow 3 days ago

I think you should disclose on the website that the game is using LLMs

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Thank you. Fair enough, I'll add a line saying that the suspects are played by a language model.

[–] dgellow 3 days ago

Thanks!

[–] mock-possum 3 days ago

I don’t know how much more explicit it could possibly be honestly. The graphics and voiceover and writing are all painfully stuffed with tells.

[–] dgellow 3 days ago

By making clear in the copy on the website that it is using LLMs

[–] wackget 3 days ago

No browser version? :(

[–] draugadrotten 3 days ago

I went to the website to play the game, and was disappointed that it was only a marketing web site for a phone app. Why not let me play the game?

[–] passkey1510 3 days ago

Hi, that's exactly what I'm working on right now. There was a technical barrier to porting the game to the web, and given the slowness of the App Store review process, I'll definitely release a web version very soon. Please stay tuned!

[–] Zecc 3 days ago

Thank you. You've saved me a click.

[–] macmac 3 days ago

Sounds like work to me.

[–] reaperducer 3 days ago

Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie

No, no, no. The LLM suspects can't lie. That requires intent. They're "hallucinating." Yeah, that's the ticket.

[–] benobi 3 days ago

add me as a beta tester

[–] benobi 3 days ago

testflight me

[–] corky_buchek 3 days ago

no thank you