emailrpg.com

jarno 2026-10-19 23:11 ♥ 1

This is an interesting idea if I ever saw one! And also a very frustrating one... I appreciate the effort you probably put into making the responses fast, really, but it's not a good combination with trying to parse semi-natural language responses. You give clues as to the acceptable inputs, but I think more strict instructions like a multiple choice and give only one command at a time would have been great. I spent way to much time setting up my character, apparently 'green' is not a valid hair color and you weren't giving mere examples but exhaustively enumerating the valid options... that's the sort of thing I mean. It's not as natural to say 'choose one of' but figuring this sort of ad-hoc parsing out is OK if the prompt is real time like on an SSH text based game, with e-mail however I think that's not a good combination. Precise prompts on e-mail or semi-natural language on SSH or something that doesn't take a half minute to reply. OK, setup is done... didn't expect a minimap and other players at the same time as me... that's nice! Also sometimes text from previous mails that automatically gets included (foo said xyz) and the automatic signature at the end get interpreted as commands when i try to move >.> it's a little unforgiving. Same deal with the dungeon mini game again, figuring out exact rules from inexact hints, it's nice and thematic but the slowness of e-mail works against it if you can't quickly try out hypothesies... Still it's been interesting enough so far, I thought about giving up at two points and just barely didn't, I'm happy about that but I'm getting tired also. I don't know if there's anything more to this game but this is where I gave up, if there's a win condition someone else will have to get there and do it. Lastly talking to others is not much fun when there not there and presumably stopped mailing long ago... maybe leaving a message as an item in world, like a tombstone or something would have been more fun than a chat that you speak one line out of and call it day. Anyways I know it's a lot of criticism for a unique format that doesn't have any (that I know of) precedent and consequently no best practices, and considering that I love what you've been able to do, still like I said an SSH game would have been fun to and much quicker and less frustrating ;). Also wouldn't have to take the time to set up a burner e-mail that way.

jarno 2026-10-19 23:12 ♥ 0

For anyone else playing this: character setup is very restrictive in what options you pick, the examples are the exhaustive list of options. And after that one command at a time (can't put two commands on different lines in the same e-mail). And your signature and cited e-mail can confuse the game so sending completely blank emails with just a command is the best way to play.

jezzamon 2026-10-19 23:23 ♥ 2

@jarno I mean I could've made a SSH game, but those have been done, a lot! Most interesting to build a new idea, I think.

Sorry the instructions aren't that precise, I guess that's something where I wrote text that's obvious to me but not as obvious to someone else... I did try to put decent error messages in there so that it was clear when you did something wrong

jezzamon 2026-10-19 23:25 ♥ 0

For a post-compo version it might be better to do a lightweight LLM that parses the responses to allow for more natural language. That's a good idea!

wouter52 2026-10-20 15:23 ♥ 1

Hi,

I hope this 'email' finds you well :-) I played your game a bit and I think I got the overall idea of it. The technical implementation is awesome I think, did you register that domain just for this game? It seems to work pretty good. I tried to sign my emails with my name, but the system did not like that when I needed to give direct commands 😁

There were other people on the island, are those NPC's? Or real LDers? I tried to say Hi, but did not really know how to do that yet.

After a while I found the gameplay to a bit stale to be honest. However, the game is so much more fun than I was prepaired for!

Love, Wouter52

P.S: I just got a late reply from one of the commands that seemed to be lost in the system. (received around 17:17 CET)

captandrey 2026-10-22 17:30 ♥ 0

That’s a cool idea :) I got stuck entering the coordinates, though: if you just reply in the same Gmail thread, you have to manually delete all the quoted text from previous messages first.

jezzamon 2026-10-24 19:08 ♥ 0

@captandrey Interesting, I didn't run into that myself when I was testing it. Mysterious...

marcus-otterstrom 2026-10-25 01:36 ♥ 0

Really fun concept! It was a bit hard to understand how the enemies were going to move and why, I read your explanation from the chat but forgot some rules after a while. The visualisations that showed which squares are dangerous or not was really helpful though. I like the email gimmick, very unique, but really appreciate that you made a Web UI to play it too, I don't think I would have finished if I had to wait for the email delay every time. Nicely done!

local-minimum 2026-10-25 10:23 ♥ 0

I once long ago made a small adventure played over mail too. But this one is way more involved! It is an interesting concept that I feel like it is best played over a sequence of many many days rather than in a single sitting. Due to how slow the medium is.

I tried to start playing this but i get stuck on the character creator. I even tried just copying the example you provided and it didn't work:

`blonde hair in a ponytail with dark skin and red clothes ` `blonde hair, ponytail, dark skin, red clothes` `short brown hair, light skin, blue clothes`

Until I tried removing the entire mail and just sending that in a blank and then it did work. So for some reason the quoting of your mail to me worked for the first mails but not that one.

For reference the way the replies get formatted by default is like this:

``` 2026-10-25 11:07 skrev game@emailrpg.com: > > Sorry, gotta ask you to spell things out for me. You gotta include hair style and color, skin color and clothes color. That is missing hair style (short, ponytail, bald), hair color (blonde, brown, black), skin color (light, medium, dark), clothes color (red, blue, green). > > Something like "short brown hair, light skin, blue clothes".

short brown hair, light skin, blue clothes ```

So I guess I'm going to take it slow and stop after the character creation for now.

Edit: I also got an error trying to just send a mail that said "go up" like one of the suggestions.

aweskybear 2026-10-26 20:54 ♥ 0

This is a bald idea and the fact you decided to go such a route is very commendable! I could just foresee technical limitations or issues you'd get into naturally! Old tech but exotic usage!

jezzamon 2026-10-27 22:44 ♥ 1

@local-minimum Yeah unfortunately the message parsing is not very well done in this game. It's super strict. I tried to make the replies get filtered correctly but I guess I didn't implement that too well, oops. As far as commands go, it needs to be something like "up", not "go up".

onedozenbagels 2026-10-28 03:42 ♥ 0

Using email was a very interesting concept and fit perfectly with the theme, however I quickly switched from email to the web version because email was so cumbersome. It was still cumbersome, especially having to scroll each time after entering a command, but I was able to win pretty quickly and give you credit for creating it. Otherwise I probably would have given up, especially because I died a lot. Nice entry!