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

Posted by passkey1510 1 day ago

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I'm the developer. The game sends you to a city, you search the places for clues, then question the suspects with your own words, typed or spoken. Each suspect is played by an LLM that only knows its own character, its own timeline and what you've shown it; it never sees the solution. You catch a lie by showing a clue against a statement, and the case engine decides whether that pair is a contradiction, not the model. Then you write the report: who, when, where, why, with proof for each.

The hard parts were not the generation. They were keeping every case solvable (a solver checks each case before it ships: every lie must be catchable with the clues on the map), keeping the suspects from leaking the truth, and keeping the AI cost per player under control (typed questions are capped per day, voice replies are cached per line).

Stack: Godot 4 client, Node on Lambda, MongoDB, Anthropic models for the suspects, ElevenLabs and Soniox for voices. Solo, built in a short sprint, launched this week on Android, iPhone waiting for Apple's review. Free, no account.

I'd like to hear what breaks: a suspect that says something dumb, a case that is unfair, a lie the engine should have caught. There's a Flag button under every reply.

Comments

Comment by passkey1510 1 day ago

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.