Explore . Create . Remember

Before I even knew text adventures were a thing, the first slightly usable program I wrote on a Sinclair ZX-81 was an attempt at Dungeons & Dragons. I say "attempt" because you can't do much with 1k of RAM.

Every computer I have ever owned has had some form of text adventure written on it in one language or another, BASIC, Pascal, C, VB, C#, Java - you name it. In fact, maybe Assembly is the only thing I was smart enough to avoid.

Text adventures are interesting because you have to build input, file handling, stream handling, language and command parsing and a bunch of other things into a single game - these are the same functions and features that productivity software is built on, the same boilerplate code that appears in any human-facing business app.

At Christmas time, in a particularly Monty Python frame of mind, I sat down and with the help of Claude, I blew the dust of a couple of decades of C knowledge and wrote the "Silly Walk Engine" - a text adventure engine that allowed users to create and play text adventures with a Python twist - utter absurdity. I kept adding features until I had finally added a web front end and figured I'd leave it at that.

As the weeks rolled by and I thought further about that project, I decided I wanted it to have a Dungeons and Dragons engine behind it, so I went a bit further and built the text adventure I always wanted as a young teenager.

I roped in my eldest son and another friend as co-designers and playtesters and we built what we initially called "TextMUD" - a text based multi user dungeon adventure based on old-school 1980's BECMI D&D rules.

I've never written web apps before, so I turned to Claude again and we decided that C# was a good place to start with some appropriate frameworks on top for making it all look good.

The more I built and the more I learned, the further the game developed until we had a full multi player engine hosting 12 adventure storylines, player-versus-player combat, multi-player parties, an in game economy (of sorts), custom imagery for locations and characters and a fully fledged suite of creator tools allowing users to build their own adventures for the platform.

I had started by using ChatGPT to create imagery, then I forked a little and using a spare PC and GPU, built a local AI engine to create our in game images, then extended it further to use the GPU and a local LLM to give in game characters and combat real time natural language dialogue.

Finally we settled on a name. We called it Hallowforge - a place where old memories are reignited, new memories are created and friends can explore together or alone.

Explore . Create . Remember

What started as a "SWAG" (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess), has turned into a chunk of work that I'm quite proud of. I doubt it will ever be a money earner - in fact, I'm not even sure it should be, this feels like it's more about fun and friends, but I learned a huge amount along the way.

AI augmented engineering is not "vibe coding". Vibe coding is when people with half an idea create something from nothing and it may not stand up to engineering scrutiny. Augmented engineering is when you 100x your output using the tools available and it still stands up to scrutiny, or comes as close to it as any modern software would.

We made Hallowforge available online recently at hallow-forge.com

If you're an old school text adventure or D&D veteran, looking for an opportunity to relive some old experiences, help play-test a new game, find bugs or get involved in some way, maybe reach out and we can have a chat about it.

Hallowforge is an AI-first project. All development is AI assisted and a number of features in the game are AI enabled.