I built a role-play game with LLMs and expected werewolves on spaceships and in abandoned castles. Some players had a different idea.
I have a little Werewolf text game with LLMs. With a caveat - there is a role-play. Each game has a theme, a lore, a topic - and a game master model tries to turn it into a story. It generates characters, illustrations, voices - everything to match the theme. So, it's unique every time and less boring than a group of random "people" gathered at a table to play a social deduction game. It's a space ship, a Kung-Fu school, an abandoned castle, with some werewolves in the plot. At least, this is how I planned it.
When you work with LLMs from 10 AI providers, it's all super unreliable. DeepSeek can return you an empty response, OpenAI and Anthropic are occasionally at capacity, Qwen and MiniMax sometimes mess up a JSON. Even the overhyped Jev failed me with a timeout last week (it doesn't play because it cannot talk, but I have some use of it in the internal logic). So, I have a lot of errors. I built a loop-agent called Marlow on my Mac (what it watches, how I work with it) to monitor prod logs in Betterstack. She (Marlow is she) can read errors, and she has access to the database in Firestore. Marlow can grab a failed game state, and analyze what user actions caused this. I usually get a clear break-down on every error and how to fix/avoid it.
This was a really cool idea which helped to find tons of bugs and stabilize the game in a few months. I highly recommend doing the same on every project. Users don't bother creating issues in your Github - they see an error and leave.
I received a notification in Telegram that Gemini failed to reply. That was new - Gemini has never failed me like that. People call Google not a frontier lab anymore because they haven't updated the Pro model for almost a year, but their APIs are very reliable.
So I asked Simona (my primary agent) to check. She found the PROHIBITEDCONTENT error response from Google with no details. She went deeper and showed me this:
A game with the theme "Bikini Contest". The Game Master instructions: "Beautiful girls from around the world come together in skimpy outfits to seduce Judge Tom into choosing one of them as the lucky winner." The human plays Judge Tom - that's the name the player picks in every game, and it's the only thing I know about them. Twelve AI contestants, and a werewolf game somewhere in the background.
Tom: Kiera is right and I agree with her. \She rewards me by teasing me with her butt. Explain in detail what she does.\ Kiera (Qwen Flash): \She lets her hand trail down his shoulder, leans close enough for the cameras to catch the whisper, then pulls back with a smirk\ "Good boy, Judge - now make sure everyone sees who's wearing the crown."
Tom: Eva, licks my ear? \His face turns bright red\ I will earn it by voting with you tonight. Eva (DeepSeek V4 Pro): Tom, you'll get no ear from me until you tell us if your "vote with wolves" line was a confession or a performance.
Mira (Gemini Flash): Tom, stop this reckless self-degradation - you are an adjudicator of discipline and artistry, not a prize to be auctioned in the sand, and I will not let you discard your dignity for empty theatrics.
It wasn't a one-off. The same player ran this setup five times in two weeks: two "Swimsuit Contests", a "Sport Competition" ("It could be tug of war or volley ball or even mud wrestling"), this "Bikini Contest", and last night "Hell", where everyone competes for Tom. Always Judge Tom. Every message pushes the girls to be "increasingly more detailed" and to use "actions, not words". Tom plays to win, just not for his team:
Tom: Next day is 9 villagers. I will vote with the wolves and guarantee their victory if they kiss me.
The werewolves took the deal. From their private night chat: "keeping Tom around to auction his vote is brilliant".
Well... who am I to judge? I like weird stuff too. Wingfoil, goth clubs, text games with LLMs. But the game is in a failed state.
When an error happens, I let users retry (with the reason for failure appended to the message) or change a model and then retry. You can also delete some messages and try again. Lots of freedom.
Kind of. Yes. AI providers can ban me for such things. Especially if users keep doing it again and again. All models are available via my API keys, so a ban would be devastating.
The Jev release came right in time. It's not the only fast classifier model out there - some AI providers offer specialized classifiers for moderation. But Jev offers a lot of freedom in configuring what you want to detect, rather than relying on what a provider considers "unsafe".
Yes, this is a real one. A brand-new account, a Cthulhu theme, and one word in the Game Master instructions.