Lucky Liars

Overview

We had an interesting idea with this one: a murder mystery video game where new character dialogue is generated each playthrough, with an integrated hardware display using nixie tubes and a small screen.

In the game, you’re a detective interrogating 3 suspects for a murder. You can speak into the mic, and the character responds in their voice. They may or may not be telling the truth! Since the hackathon’s theme was “Beat the Odds”, we incorporated a mechanic where each time a player says something, the game “rolls the dice” from 0 to 20 on the nixie tubes. With a higher roll, the polygraph reading will be more accurate. Your goal is to use your questions and your judgment to determine which of the three suspects is the murderer (it changes every playthrough).

Here’s what the game looks like in action:

check out those nixie tubes! ^^

Technical Details

For some absolutely silly reason, we built the game using the Bevy game engine in Rust. DO NOT use Rust to build a game, especially at a hackathon (see The Fateful Five). We did manage it pull it off though. Thankfully I wasn’t on game dev duty, I just dealt with the API server. Game assets were built by hand (painstakingly) in Blender.

The fan favorite character Clyde, shown in the above gif, is a Vietnam war vet who starts every sentence with “Back in ‘nam”.

The game client talks to an Express.js API server, which generates dialogue with GPT-4 and handles character data. Each character has their own personality, as well as their own voice generated by ElevenLabs! Every time you speak into the mic, it converts speech to text, then prompts for the response text, then converts that back to speech for the character’s spoken response in-game.

The game also communicates with a Raspberry Pi Pico over USB to control the telegraph and nixie tubes. I know very little about hardware so please read this very detailed README if you’re curious about that part! Big props to my friend Dawson on the hardware, if you ever see cool hardware components in these projects it was usually Dawson who cooked them up