Lagos, 2038. You meet Amara — an 11-year-old girl hiding something she won’t explain.
This is a story you don’t read. You have to earn it. Five AI-powered characters, each knowing a different piece of the truth. The plot only moves forward if you ask the right questions — no dialogue trees, no menus, just natural conversation.
Would love to hear whether it feels like a story or just a chatbot — and whether the AI conversation mechanic adds to the experience or gets in the way.
It’s cool & all, but I’d care more about your Wordpress security mate
Within 5 minutes I was able to pinpoint the hosting company you’re on, an address of the very server within this hosting where your page resides, a straight, non-protected admin login URL and an easy way to fish for admin email without any problems.
At least change the defaults
…and mabye don’t use translatepress, just good ol’ multisite. You’ll save yourself a few bucks and a lot of headaches, trust me
Played it for a bit. It was neat to see some level of intelligent responses. Nothing felt out of place. A bit terse. I was hoping to see some descriptive prose with her responses though. Like, dialog in a book is more than just what is said. So, yes, it feels like a chat bot because I’m locked into a very long chat session with the main character. Descriptive prose would help alleviate that feeling of “just chatting” and invite a more story-like feel.
Also, it did feel like ticking boxes was the goal. I don’t like that rigid feeling, so when I found out about the brother, I wanted to go and talk to him, but I was stuck in a chat with the girl and couldn’t see any obvious way to visit him so after a bit I quit the game.
Edit:Oh, and if you don’t want it to feel like a chat bot, don’t label your submit button with SEND. I mean, that’s the epitome of a chat program in my books.
Changed the button to “Reply” — you’re right, it was an obvious chatbot signal and I should have caught that earlier.
On the chatbot feeling — there’s actually a layer of Claire’s internal thoughts that appears between NPC responses, kind of replacing the descriptive prose you’d find in a book. It sounds like you might not have seen much of it, which makes sense — looking at the logs, it seems you finished after the first conversation.
There are five conversations in total, and the clue-hunting mechanic gets much looser as the story progresses. The first chat with Amara is probably the most “checkbox” feeling because you’re just getting started and the game needs to establish the basics. It opens up a lot after that — there’s a doctor, a police inspector, an organ broker, and it ends with rescuing Amara’s brother from the facility.
The fact that you wanted to go talk to the brother is honestly a good sign — it means the story pulled you in. That’s the whole point.
Would be curious what you think if you get a chance to go further.
@dff How do I go see the brother then? I felt stuck. Do I have to get all the check boxes ticked before I can leave the chat?
The fact that you wanted to go talk to the brother is honestly a good sign.
Definitely. I like exploring in games. I’ll come back to NPCs later if it feels right to me, but I thought the brother might give me more information about what to ask the sister.
Thanks for playing — and for the prompt injection attempts, that’s the most useful stress test I could ask for. Amara held up pretty well I think.
Also took your security notes seriously — added login protection and installed a firewall. Genuinely hadn’t thought about it before, so thanks for that.
On TranslatePress — fair point, but the story was built in Polish first and I needed 8 languages fast without a team or a big budget. Google Translate plus manual corrections gets me there. Not perfect, but it works for a solo project with limited resources. If you spot anything that reads badly in English, feel free to flag it.
Also: lime cake sounds genuinely good and I may have to add it to the epilogue.
Fair catch - yes, I’ve been using AI to help polish the replies. English isn’t my first language.
To answer your question: yes, you need to finish the chat before the story moves forward. Just fixed Amara’s behaviour too - she’ll now stay in the room instead of agreeing to go places with you. The chat is meant to be a short conversation, maybe 15 minutes, and the action continues in narrative form after it ends.
If you’re not sure how to unlock the next scene, follow the hints that appear in the chat - they’ll nudge you in the right direction.
Yeah, the system held up pretty nicely I must say, i give Amara the Lime Cake award for being such a brave girl
…I might come back later when I think of something more sophisticated though
No problem. If I may, I’d like to suggest an additional thing - redirect your /wp-admin to some more obfuscated URL, else you’ll unfortunately soon have a wave of bot attacks once the auto-crawlers figure out you have an exposed login screen. Simple, but should do the trick.
There are of course some plugins that will do it for you
I get the translation part, on that TranslatePress works nicely - but be aware that the plugin essentially kills any meaningful SEO indexation unless you do some really tedious config shenanigans, if you’re aiming for your site to be seen. Been there unfortunately.
@dff No problem. Just let people know that English isn’t your first language when you make formal request/announcement posts. And, I guess hyphens are better than em-dashes.
I like helping people with story ideas, narrative delivery, game mechanics, interface design… but I feel like anymore time spent would be focused on me training your AI. So, I wish you the best of luck with your game. The presentation is pretty awesome, to be honest. Locking AI into conversation-only mechanics is an intriguing approach that does have merit. I like the REPLY button much, much better!
https://future-logs.com/en/amara/
