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The RagCat
The RagCat

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A WhatsApp game where you create your own Adventure

This is a submission for the Twilio Challenge

What I Built

A story-driven text-based game that is played through WhatsApp in an asynchronous, non intrusive way, adapting to players' schedules. The game is inspired in interactive fiction, choose your own adventure books, D&D, and busy lives.

Players, together with a group of friends (or solo), are part of a story of 7 chapters, crafted by an AI Game Master and delivered one chapter at a time via text (WhatsApp). At the end of each chapter, each player choose what to do do next and their answers are combined to create the next chapter of the story.

Demo

You can see it in action at 👉 https://universe1340.com and even give it a spin with the "Join" button.

Gameplay Screenshot

Twilio and AI

The backend integrates Twilio’s WhatsApp API to manage player interactions and deliver both images and story segments. Setting everything with Twilio was actually very easy and straightforward - The hard part is getting the approval from Meta for a business account. The "Game Master", powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT api, generates story advancements based on player decisions and a virtual luck system, and it ensures a unique experience for each participant and story.

Additional Prize Categories

Impactful Innovators: The game offers an innovative way to experience storytelling and engage users in a non intrusive way.

Entertaining Endeavors: As an entertaining and immersive game, it captivates players with its dynamic and evolving storyline.

Team Submissions

We built this as a team together with @delbronski

Where's the source code?

A messy, undocumented code would not help anyone, so in our todo list is to clean it up and make the repo public. Or at least to write dev post with our learning and snippets.

Is this a full product?

Not really. It is fully functional, but only available to a limited amount of users. There's a cost related limitation: Haven't found a way to lower the costs enough to open it fully.

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