Legend of Now – Temple of Z
A browser game about walking the desert of the Now. No build step: open index.html (or the hosted build) and play. The same page exposes window.game, so an agent can observe the world, act, and advance time without anyone sitting at the screen.
Play (human)
WASD or the arrow keys move. Q and E (or the left and right arrows) turn. Z fires. X or Shift spends Now-shift: for two seconds the world, including the level clock, runs at quarter speed while you keep most of yours. On-screen buttons and a gamepad do the same thing.
Three levels. The dunes want 10 relic coins. The pilgrim road wants 6 wisdom crystals. The threshold wants the chasers gone, the Guardian down, and a walk into the portal. Three lives. Touching a chaser costs one and defeats that chaser. Bolts defeat chasers at a distance.
Nothing here changes when you open the game normally. Agent controls are inert until something calls them.
Agent API
The page always installs window.game. Useful flags:
| Flag | Effect |
|---|
?agent=1 | Step mode. Time advances only when step(n) is called. The picture still renders, so a person can watch. |
?headless=1 | Step mode, and the page skips drawing, shadows, bloom, and cosmetic particles. This is the mode the bots use. |
?seed=1 | Seeds relic, wisdom, and chaser rolls. Combined with step mode, the same inputs replay the same run. |
?bot=1 | After load, runs the built-in reference bot. Optional &levels=1 and &maxTicks=7000. |
?agent=1 and ?headless=1 both count as on when the value is empty, 1, true, yes, or on.
await window.game.ready;
window.game.act('start');
window.game.act({ forward: 1, turn: 0.2, fire: true });
const obs = window.game.step(5); // 5 ticks of 1/30 s. Returns the observation.
Methods
ready — Promise. Resolves when the cast has loaded and the menu is up.getState() — Compact observation. Drains the event queue.listActions() — The action catalog.act(action) — A string ("forward", "fire", "now_shift", "start", "restart", …) or a move object {forward, strafe, turn, fire, shift}. Axes latch until changed and are clamped to [-1, 1]. fire and shift happen once, on the next tick. Returns {ok, error?}.step(n) — Simulate n ticks (max 5000) at a fixed 1/30 second and return the observation. Calling it switches the page into step mode.setSeed(seed, {restart}) — Seed used the next time a level loads. restart: true reloads level 1 now.setDrive("realtime" | "step") — Hand the clock back to the display, or take it again.manifest — The same document served at /agent.json.
String actions set one channel and leave the others alone. "stop" clears move and turn. "forward" then "turn_left" walks while turning.
Observation
getState() is JSON. It carries the level and its story, objective counters, score, lives, time left, Now-shift meter, and the player pose (x, z, yaw, heading). Nearby chasers, pickups (kind of coin or wisdom), the portal, the NPC, and the boss (when one exists) each include world x/z plus dx, dz, dist, and bearing relative to the player. Bearing is signed radians: positive means the target is to the left, which is the direction of turn_left. Yaw 0 faces −Z, toward the temple. Lists are nearest first.
outcome is null, "cleared", "failed", or "won". levelsCleared is how many levels this run has finished. drive is "realtime" or "step". events since the previous read include coin, wisdom, enemy_down, hurt, boss_hit, boss_down, now_shift, level_cleared, level_failed, and game_won.
Movement is on the ground plane. The player walks at 8 units/s and turns at up to 2.4 rad/s. Bolts travel at 16 units/s and hit a chaser within 1.2 units horizontally. Now-shift slows the world (clock and bolts included) to 1/4 for 2 seconds, then cools down for 8.
Manifest
/agent.json (and window.game.manifest) is a machine-readable description of the actions, the observation, and the tool schemas. An MCP client can treat tools as its tool list. The copy on disk is generated from js/manifest.js:
node scripts/write-manifest.mjs
Run the reference bot
The bot in js/bot.js is a heuristic: it faces threats, kites when they get close, shoots when the bearing is tight, grabs the nearest relic or crystal it still needs, and walks into an open portal. It only talks to window.game.
npm install
npm run bot # all 3 levels, seed 1
node scripts/run-bot.mjs --levels 1 --seed 1 # level 1 only
node scripts/run-bot.mjs --levels 3 --seed 2
Headless Chrome (or Chromium) has to be on PATH. Set CHROME_PATH if it lives somewhere else. The script exits 0 when the requested number of levels are cleared.
On seed 1 the reference bot finishes the legend: level 1 with all three lives, then the pilgrim road, then the Guardian and the portal. That run is the default for npm run bot and npm test.
npm test parses the modules, checks the manifest and the heuristic, checks that keyboard play still moves the hero, checks step mode, replay, and that a bolt can defeat a chaser, checks the HTTP bridge, and runs the bot.
Drive it from outside
scripts/agent-bridge.mjs loads the game in headless Chrome and speaks three protocols.
npm run agent # HTTP on 127.0.0.1:8787, seed 1
node scripts/agent-bridge.mjs --port 8787 --seed 1
node scripts/agent-bridge.mjs --stdio
node scripts/agent-bridge.mjs --mcp
HTTP:
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8787/api/state
curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787/api/act -d '{"action":"start"}' -H 'content-type: application/json'
curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787/api/step -d '{"n":10,"action":{"forward":1,"fire":true}}' -H 'content-type: application/json'
curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787/api/bot -d '{"levels":1}' -H 'content-type: application/json'
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
