Journey Space: Love's Last Mayday

IMPORTANT: OpenRouter API key is required to play! See instructions.

Welcome aboard the USS Craptraption 2—where your crew is alive, unpredictable, and entirely powered by AI. No scripts. No canned responses. Just Simulant characters who think, remember, and occasionally spiral into existential crisis.

You’re the Captain. You’re also the Director. How this story unfolds is up to you.
(Just don’t expect your crew to always listen to you.)

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Project Description

This is a prototype in development -- an experimental sci-fi character drama featuring "living" Simulant characters powered by LLM APIs  that like to eat your API credits for breakfast. The goal is LLM-driven emergent storytelling, where characters evolve naturally instead of following a script.

You play both the director of the story and Captain Jack Clapton of the USS Craptraption 2. It is your new crew's first day on board. As "director" of the story, you can Reroll dialog from your crew, and as Captain, talk with them directly to try to urge the plot to move forward.

No NPCS

This isn’t a game where you follow a story.
It’s a game where you shape it.

Your crew is entirely LLM driven Simulants, not NPCs. They have thoughts, emotions, needs, relationships and more driving their responses. You can try bossing them around but they may not like you. What kind of leader will you be?

• The AI crew remembers past conversations.
• Their personalities evolve.
• They won’t always obey orders.
• And when the AI gets weird? You can Reroll the script.

Large Language Limitations

Your crew isn’t perfect. They’ll talk in circles, forget things, and sometimes say the weirdest stuff imaginable. That’s the nature of AI and sometimes that’s part of the charm.
Your job? Keep the story on track—or let it derail in the best way possible.

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NOTE: The game has no save function at the moment! Don't get attached.

Your first mission: Find work.
The ship is broke. The sponsors bailed. You’re stranded at Starbase 000.
Someone on this station has a contract that can get you flying again—
if you can convince your crew to do the legwork.

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Role-Play Backstory

Captain Clapton in the first USS Craptraption was attacked by the dread pirate Numan Dogmatica on a sketch mind-tech cargo delivery mission taking a shortcut through inadvisable space. With little fuel and nothing left to lose, Clapton rammed the pirate ship. 

Pieces of the USS Craptraption arrived at the Jump Gate and Clapton managed to impress the locals with his story.  Sponsors took interest and funded the creation of the USS Craptraption 2, only to back out before the ship refueled. Now totally broke with a fully crewed ship that can't go anywhere, it's up to the crew to find work for the ship.

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Crew
Chief Pilot Chudwick Persopolis: A gruff veteran pilot from New Titan.

Deck Security Bork: A 2.6 meter Glorbulon from Glorbulus 9.

Deck Medic Kathryn Van Lawyer: A Space Academy graduate from the wealthy planet Cobal XIII.

Deck Mechanic Grub: A crude asteroider looking for new thrills.

Junior Mechanic OTTO: An Android that was in a box in a warehouse for 17 years, and in fact is still in that box (type UNBOX:OTTO to add OTTO to the crew)

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Interface

The large text area shows the game output. This includes character's private thoughts, emotions, speech, and other debug information and random details about what's going on.

Below that is the Character Speech area.

The proposed responses go into the LLM Speech Box. This let's you optionally review the LLM responses before they become canon.  

To use this, set Review Responses to "All Chats" for all conversations, or "Captain Chats" for conversations with the Captain only. Then you may either Reroll the response or Accept it to make it part of everyone's brain forever. The Reroll option will allow you to change the model and adjust it's temperature (randomness) as well as to add Additional User Instructions (ie: "stop talking about food that's boring as hell")

[<][>] : Not yet implemented

At the bottom is the Captain Chat area. During crew meetings, you can talk to characters in the Captain's Room.

Captain's Chat Instructions:

If you want the Captain to speak, enter your text in the Captain Chat text box and press Enter or Submit. If you want to say more, repeat this. Otherwise, click Skip Turn. You can keep chatting for 1 in-game hour (60 total dialog lines) or press End Captain Chat to end the chat at any time.

Dialog is optional, especially in a group conversation, so to let another character reply in a Captain Chat, hit "Skip Turn".

Debug and Character Portraits:

On the right, you can get more information on any character in the game by selecting them and choosing Brain Dump for a LARGE AMOUNT OF TEXT representing their entire brain-state, or Character Info to see the basics in the game output area. This is mostly for debug.

There's also a background image for the room the conversation is taking place in, and character portraits along with who's speaking.

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OPEN ROUTER API KEY INSTRUCTIONS

IMPORTANT: At the moment you must have an OpenRouter account and create an API key to play. Then you must set the API key on your PC. 

1) Close any streaming software! Don't expose your API key!

2) Set your API key. To do this:

Windows Key -> type cmd

This opens a command prompt window. In the command prompt window, type:

setx OPENROUTER_API_KEY_LLM_SPACECREW "your-api-key-here"

Replace your-api-key-here with your actual OpenRouter API key.

3) Verify it works:

Reboot your PC first. 

Windows Key -> type cmd

In the command prompt:

echo %OPENROUTER_API_KEY_LLM_SPACECREW%

Make sure your API key appears. 

4) $$$ Monitor your spending! This can eat up credits, especially if you use the pricier models like Claude Sonnet. $$$

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