How to Build a Conversational AI Game: A Voice-Driven Murder Mystery
A conversational AI game is a game you play by talking to intelligent characters instead of pushing buttons. The core architecture is a speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech pipeline: the player speaks, the game transcribes their words, an LLM decides how the character responds, and text-to-speech speaks that response back aloud. This is the same loop used by Shadowlight, a voice-driven murder mystery played inside Minecraft that earned 24 points on Hacker News, and by Mantella, a Skyrim and Fallout 4 mod with roughly 400 GitHub stars. If you want to build one, this guide walks through the reference architecture, tool choices, and the UX pitfalls that separate a forgettable voice game from one players emotionally attach to. ...