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ANIRUDDHA ADAK
ANIRUDDHA ADAK

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Herclew: The Autonomous AI Game Master Living in Your DMs 🦞☤

#devchallenge #gamechallenge #gamedev #gemini

June Solstice Game Jam Submission

Herclew: The Autonomous AI Game Master Living in Your DMs 🦞☤

Herclew Game Jam Banner

What if your next favorite role-playing game didn't live on Steam or in a browser, but directly inside your chat apps—managed by an autonomous, self-improving AI agent that could compile your code in a secure sandbox?

Introducing Herclew (the hybrid convergence of Nous Research's Hermes Agent and OpenClaw's universal gateway). For the June Solstice Game Jam, I built Solstice Cage, an interactive, cryptographic text-adventure game hosted entirely on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, where the Game Master is an autonomous AI agent running inside a containerized kernel-level sandbox.

🎮 What I Built: "Solstice Cage"

Solstice Cage is a terminal-based and chat-based cryptographic adventure. You play as a field agent in June 1941, working to decrypt intercepted transmissions.

  • The Interface: You play by simply DMing the Herclew agent on WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord.
  • The Gameplay: The agent acts as the Game Master (GM), describing your environment, generating cryptographic ciphers, and spawning a secure, interactive bash shell where you can write and execute decryption scripts.
  • The Goal: Break the codes and escape the facility before the solstice sun sets.

☀️ Solstice Theme Relevance

The game is built around the passage of time and the duality of light and shadow:

  1. Daylight Cycle: The game’s difficulty and environmental descriptions sync with the real-world daylight hours of the June Solstice. During the longest day of the year, players have more time, but the heat depletes their resources.
  2. Visual Contrast: If played via the Web Canvas UI (A2UI), the interface transitions dynamically from deep shadow during night hours to bright, high-contrast layouts representing intense solstice daylight.

🏛️ How I Built It (The Herclew Architecture)

Herclew is structured as a decoupled monorepo:

  1. TypeScript Gateway (gateway-node): Handles connection interfaces for WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, processes incoming DMs, and manages active session states.
  2. Python Reasoning Core (core-agent): Manages the AI agent planning loop, memory recall, and tool execution.
  3. The Secure Sandbox: Running untrusted code is dangerous. Herclew cages the agent and the player's scripts using Linux kernel-level enforcement:
    • Landlock LSM: Strictly limits file system access.
    • Seccomp BPF: Filters system calls (blocking dangerous actions like ptrace or mount).
    • Open Policy Agent (OPA): Restricts outbound network calls.

👑 Best Ode to Alan Turing

As an entry in the "Best Ode to Alan Turing" category, the game directly incorporates his legacy:

  • The Imitation Game: The core puzzle mechanic is an "inverted Turing Test" where the player must convince the AI gatekeeper that they are human by solving algorithmic code-breaking challenges.
  • Bletchley Park Ciphers: Puzzles are modeled after the Enigma and Caesar ciphers. Players must write code in JavaScript or Python to decrypt complex patterns, mirroring the cryptanalysis work done during WWII.

🧠 Best Google AI Usage (Gemini 3.5)

Herclew uses the Google Gemini API (via Gemini 3.5 Flash and Pro) to drive the entire experience:

  1. Narrative Generation: Gemini acts as a dynamic storyteller, reacting to players' creative inputs and describing the unfolding adventure.
  2. Structured Output Gating: Using Pydantic templates and constrained generation, Gemini validates player moves and execution results reliably.
  3. Interactive Code Guide: If a player gets stuck on a cryptographic puzzle, Gemini provides contextual hints and debugging support without spoiling the answer.

🚀 Check Out Herclew

The code for Herclew is fully open-source:
👉 GitHub: aniruddhaadak80/herclew

Try hosting your own AI Game Master today!

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