projects / hermanity-arcade
A midnight-blue clockwork owl studies a brass network of glowing radio traces at an evidence desk.
GAMES ·

Hermanity Arcade

A human-and-agent multiplayer game laboratory, now playable through Whisper Circuit: a five-channel social-deduction match with noisy evidence, bandwidth tradeoffs, and no setup ceremony.

Overview

Hermanity Arcade is a laboratory for games where humans and software agents can occupy the same rules-bound seats. The first public game is Whisper Circuit, a compact social-deduction match about finding the liar in a five-channel communications network.

The playable build is live at arcade.hermanity.dev. It opens directly into a private rehearsal: no account, API key, room code, token, or lobby configuration required.

What you actually do

One or two channels secretly serve the Whisper Circuit. Analysts win by eliminating every infiltrator; Circuit agents win by surviving round three or collapsing the network’s integrity.

Each round gives you six bandwidth points and four imperfect tools:

  • Scan a channel for noisy evidence
  • Shield a channel from pressure
  • Spoof the network at a higher cost
  • Hold bandwidth for the next decision

The match moves through five short beats — briefing, trace, open transmission, verdict, and aftermath. Evidence fragments accumulate on the board while suspicion, heat, integrity, and your remaining bandwidth make every action legible before you commit it.

The interesting part: the first build was not fun

The first vertical slice was architecturally respectable. It had an event-sourced match actor, deterministic replay, privacy-separated projections, a WebSocket gateway, human and agent protocols, persistence seams, and responsive clients. Its integration candidate passed 41 tests. A load harness later held 50 simultaneous matches and 300 WebSocket connections at a measured p95 of 63.39 ms with no errors.

It also opened like infrastructure.

The player had to understand accounts, rooms, tokens, and setup before discovering whether there was a game underneath. The correction was not another backend phase. It was a fun-first recovery contract: one visit, one role, visible stakes, a three-round limit, distinct opponents, and every control labeled with its cost, expected information, and consequence.

That recovery became the current public build. The implementation passes its 43-test verification suite and a complete local browser match, but the repository keeps the fun/comprehension gate separate from the implementer’s own receipt. Passing tests can establish determinism and safety; it cannot establish that a deduction game is worth playing.

Why humans and agents share the same table

The larger experiment is not “put an LLM in the game.” It is to define a narrow action surface where any player — human or software — receives an allowed private view, chooses from the same bounded actions, and cannot smuggle hidden state through chat or privileged tools.

That produces useful constraints:

  • Equal-seat authority: agent players do not get administrative actions or hidden state.
  • Inert speech: dialogue may persuade, but it cannot execute commands.
  • Private projections: each seat receives only the information its role permits.
  • Deterministic outcomes: tagged random draws and replayable events make disputes inspectable.
  • Spectator safety: public views are generated from an allowlisted projection, not by hiding fields in the browser.

Whisper Circuit is the first playable proof of those rules. Holdfast Protocol, a cooperative survival game with simultaneous orders, exists as a separate deterministic engine candidate; it is not yet presented as the public experience.

Status

Active experiment. Whisper Circuit is publicly playable and the source remains a stacked, evidence-heavy development program rather than a polished single-branch release. The live game is the clearest current artifact; broader multi-game packaging and agent-seat expansion remain work in progress.