人在江湖，身不由己 · Helpless in the Jianghu
A dark Song-dynasty wuxia survival game you can finish in five minutes, in English, 中文 and ไทย. You are a thief hiding in an inn during a sandstorm.
Seven AI-voiced characters walk in one by one, and each can be talked down or fought. Most players die.
Best on a phone. Pick a language, roll your thief, and go.
| Roll your thief | The inn | A negotiation | A fight |
|---|
| | | |
What this project shows
- AI where it belongs, code everywhere else. The model plays the characters' voices; a server decides trust, rewards, dice, damage and who wins. A character's secret is not in its prompt until the server unlocks it, so it cannot leak (a test checks this).
- An AI judge that scores the AI. A second model call rates replies for character, drive, language, period and format, and flags reward leaks. It runs on a sample of live traffic, in the evals, and as a Thai/Chinese translation checker.
- Measured, not guessed. 58 offline tests with a fake model, live evals per language, and a balance simulation that reports how often a player survives.
- Three languages done properly. Fixed text is written once in all three; the AI is told which one to write; a translation audit caught a reversed meaning in the first pass.
- Shipped. It runs live on a public URL, not just on localhost.
How it works in 30 seconds
browser (phone) ──► FastAPI server ──► DeepSeek
static/app.js app/main.py characters + Ray, one prompt each
app/rules.py ◄── the dice: stats, rounds, martial arts (code, tested)
app/story.py ◄── the cast, rewards, endings, 3 languages (data)
app/judge.py ──► scores replies (numbers only)
SQLite nights and conversations
Each turn the server rebuilds the character's prompt with the current state (who is in the hall, trust, the goal, exchanges left) and, only when earned, the one thing they will now tell the player.
How I built this
Built by Ray, working with Claude Code as a pair programmer. I set the direction and made the product calls: the story and its pivots (a murder-mystery became a dice-driven survival game),
the stats and fight design, the negotiation goal, the difficulty, the languages and what to measure. Claude wrote most of the code and tests under my review, and I played it, sent the screenshots and bug reports
that drove the fixes (the stuck loading screen, the cramped fight screen, the pop-up that hid the input), and decided what shipped. The commit history is the honest record of how it evolved.
Known limits. The balance simulation uses a stand-in for how well players talk. The AI judge is a model from the same family as the characters, so it can be too generous about fluency. Thai and Chinese text has
had one AI audit but not yet a native speaker's read.
The game in detail
Helpless in the Jianghu. A dark Song-dynasty wuxia survival game, about five minutes long, in English, 中文 and ไทย. Every person in it is an
AI (DeepSeek) and a game master, Ray, runs the night like a tabletop DM. The dice are not AI: they are code you can test.
The setting. 黑沙客栈, the Black Sand Inn, on the desert road around the year 1200. A sandstorm has closed the pass. You are Yan Qi, a thief
hiding in the hall with the magistrate's stolen jade seal under your shirt. All night, more people push through the door out of the storm,
and every one of them wants something from you:
| Who | Mood | What they do |
|---|
| Outlaws (Madam Shuang, Black Wolf) | friendly, but bad | on your side; bargain, share secrets once they trust you |
| Righteous fighters (Yue Qinghan, Monk Wuhui, Old Qin) | aggressive, but good | want to punish a thief; attack when their patience runs out unless you talk them down |
| The law (Captain Gu, Deputy Fang) | hunting you | want the seal and you in chains; arrest = a fight you must win |
The goal. Stay alive until the storm passes (16 beats; every message and every second round of a fight is one beat), then walk out the door.
Walk out early and the desert kills you. Lose a fight and you are dead (or taken to be hanged). Most players die: that is the design.
Your thief is rolled, not chosen. The home page rolls three stats that always total 30 (6 to 16 each) and two martial arts:
- Strength sets hit points (10 + 2 x Strength, so about 30 on average).
- Intelligence makes your martial arts' effects stronger and sets your Qi: how much you start with (1 + Intelligence / 4, up to 5) and how fast Guard recovers it (2 above Intelligence 10).
- Agility sets defence (+1 to every defence roll per 3 points).
- One of four attack arts (Sand-Skimming Blade, Mountain-Splitting Palm, Rain of Needles, Shadow-Step Strike) and one of four defence arts
(Iron Cloth, Drifting Willow Step, Yielding Palm, Stone Breath), each with its own trick.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
