It’s a narrative battle simulator. In the game, random animals from all across the animal kingdom are mutated by one of eight special types, granted powers that befit their types, and instructed to fight each other. You give the commands and your mutated lil fella carries them out for you. It’s based on text. It’s a text-based game.
There are types ranging from elemental types (FIRE, WATER), to more unusual types (COSMIC, SHADOW), to aberrant failures (MUTANT). Each personality type is built around deep semantic graphs of animal heritage and mutation variety, and each type has its own grammatical quirks, its own manners of speech, and its own strengths and weaknesses. I have finely-tuned eight LoRA adapters for one small Qwen LLM that are packed with useful words that help guide your monster through communicating actions, movements, and announcements that relate to their character. Birds will talk about their wings. Wolves will talk about their fangs. Snakes slither, tigers pounce, but more, they will talk about their mutation, too. An EARTH horse will kick with the weight of ages. A COSMIC gorilla will break reality with a wave of its arm. A FIRE mamba will spit flaming venom. There is a massive degree of uniqueness and variety to the responses. There is actually too much for the LLM to handle.
Your monsters will take damage and respond, they will mock the opponent, they will react to status effects, to the amount of damage taken, to victory and defeat. You can even feed them between battles (still in beta). I have developed versatile syntactic patterns (lots of sentence templates) to make all the words fit, then the LLM spins them together, adds its own flavour, and spins them back out.
There are two modes, CPU and PVP. CPU is entirely local. PVP takes place entirely over Bluetooth. Yes, you can play with your friends!
It’s even the most modern, up-to-date application of Bluetooth I could manage. It uses modern Bluetooth Low Energy as a primary and classic RFCOMM to make connections if BLE fails. It uses dbus-fast, a modern Bluetooth library, to improve connectivity, and I’ve implemented cryptographic handling of the messages between to prevent interference. It should even work on Windows and between Linux/Windows machines (still in development). At battle start, a VERY rough distance measurement is taken, and that sets the game environment. Your monsters have room to move around the battlefield, and you can direct their movements about it. You can MELEE attack from CLOSE, or RANGED attack from FAR. You can MELEE attack from FAR, too, and do less damage!
There is a lot of variety to the combat. I’m talking things like type effectiveness, status effects, misses, critical hits, and animal advantages (like predator/prey weighting), that all affect how much damage is given and received. For example, SHADOW types are weak against FIRE, but relatively strong against everything else, and don’t take damage from PHYSICAL non-fire attacks. They suffer from low HP to compensate. The CUSTOM COMMAND option also incorporates calculations like creativity weighting, so use that to your advantage.
The game engine fundamentally relies on the English language, and the vagaries of a Chinese-made large language model, to function. Not every sentence produced by SLOP FIGHTER is accurate, correct, or even complete. The LLM works hard to chop and mix words, but the Qwen model I’ve used is a quantised 1.7B version. It’s just a lil dummy. It knows not what it really does. I wanted to build this whole project on top of the smallest LLM I could conceivably use for the job. As such, SLOP FIGHTER will run on almost any Linux machine quite well. It will even run on a Raspberry Pi 5. In fact, it runs BEST on a Raspberry Pi 5, due to their suitably advanced Bluetooth chips. It is slow on the Pi 5, but that adds to the old Gameboy-style charm.
Here’s a demo of it running on my computer:
To me, this project kind of demonstrates how I see the world. I have, in the past, visualised words sliding into place based on factors like semantics and statistical likelihood just in time for my mouth to say them, or my hands to write them. I wouldn’t at all suggest that is my whole approach, but I understand it. Also with SLOP FIGHTER, too, are smooth, fluid animations that help the words slot into place and the game carry on. The whole thing is one careful, intricate balancing act threatening to spill over into chaos and madness. Just like the world we live in.
This game will be released on Steam and itch.io in the coming weeks. I am bad at marketing so we’ll see how she goes tbh. I also pretty firmly believe this is the sort of thing Steam would do with Half-Life 3.
