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Town

Discord in a pixel town where the NPCs have skills

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I built this thing called Town. Think Discord, but you walk around a pixel town where the NPCs have skills.Agents have become my initial brainstorm partner for a lot of stuff — sub-agents to counter my own thinking, role-playing a specific person, grounding them in a specific knowledge so they refer instead of guess. I started turning my claude-code into this pattern and it worked well enough that I wanted to see if I turn into a fun shareable thing where other people can also talk to.It's a small pixel map of buildings. You walk in, step into any building, and talk to the npcs who live there.Each NPC is an AI agent with its own personality (voice, backstory, what they care about) and a skillset (tools like memory, web search, writing docs). The personality makes them fun to talk to; the tools make them able to actually do something.Multiplayer/Group discussions: Real people wander the same map. If someone else is in your town you see them walking around and can chat live. Step into a building together and press G to open a shared chat between the humans and AI avatars in that room.The engineering bit I like most: each NPC is a separate agent with scoped tool permissions. The author decides which tools each one gets — a shopkeeper can hand out inventory, a detective can issue a Case Closed card, a barista just talks.A few towns I've built:- AI Startup Town: get in a room with NPCs of famous investors — Paul Graham, Garry Tan, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell. Pitch your idea, stress-test your plan, build your startup doc.- Murder Mystery Town: Iris Bell is dead. Talk to the NPCs, catch someone in a contradiction, figure out who did it, and report back to Detective Reeve to close the case.- Roast Town: get roasted, or learn the fundamentals of roasting.- CORE Town: the sampler — one town that shows off everything. Pitch Garry Tan at YC House, stand trial at Trial of You, get worked over by a noir detective, get roasted. Best place to start.You can build your own town too, and it's open source. A town is just a JSON + MDX folder — a buildings list, one .mdx per AI avatar (frontmatter = identity, body = system prompt) — then town deploy from the CLI. There's also a claude plugin that builds the whole thing in one shot from a rough description.Guest mode, no signup:Startup: https://town.getcore.me/startup?invite_code=7EQMH0Murder Mystery: https://town.getcore.me/murder-mystery?invite_code=S85S24Roast: https://town.getcore.me/roast-town?invite_code=0MXN93CORE Town: https://town.getcore.me/core-town?invite_code=H4C0TZFull list: https://town.getcore.me/exploreSource: https://github.com/RedPlanetHQ/townRather fun project overall. Honestly I have been thinking a lot about how community engagement is changing with agents and this felt like a good way. It's a very raw shot. Kindly share your thoughts and feedback.

HN · launched Jul 14, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 0 views

Niche: ai interactive fiction and rpg platforms · 63 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -55% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Communication
  • B2C
  • AI feature
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes A 2D pixel-art virtual space (using Phaser, Canvas, or standard web tech) that integrates chat channels and NPC bots wired up to LLM APIs is well within the scope of vibe coding.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Single chat surface not optimal for AI and people gathering, Agent tabs UI feels boring

Feature requests: Elevated experience for shared surface with AI-NPCs and people, Town-specific creative themes and interaction rhythms, User representation in customizable towns

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 512 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #423 of 513 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 256 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.