Comment by 🚀 adavies
@zzo38 : Implementation wise are a lot of approaches to take, I think that is something to care about later. First is feasibility, and more important (and what I really would like to know) is if the community would be interested in having these kind of apps and playing them.
Call it a coincidence, but after publishing this, I found a post by Solderpunk, addressing a lot of the things I mentioned:
— On Stagnation and Burnout in the Gemini Community
One thing got my interest the most: It might be possible that there are not so much interactive games here, not because of the technical difficulties, but because the average geminaut is escaping all those things. So I want to be sure if this is something community have interests before I commit to it.
2025-07-26 · 9 months ago
15 Later Comments ↓
👾 jecxjo · 2025-07-26 at 22:58:
I think the other style that works well in gemini is the "by mail" style games. Turn based games that don't require a lot of monitoring beyond when you make your move.
There once was a category of games that were large world battle sims. You would tell an army to go somewhere and the game would tell you they will arrive in 5 out of game hours. So you would go on with your life until then. I think this model of interaction would work well.
🚀 adavies [OP] · 2025-07-26 at 23:07:
@jecxjo : Yes! Exactly that is the OGame play style for example. Or to make an upgrade to some building will take x hours, as well. And you would get notified when its done. Thats exactly the kind of playstyle im aiming for.
🌆 skyjake [mod...] · 2025-07-27 at 04:23:
@adavies First, some gemtext syntax advice for your capsule: whitespace should be used a bit more carefully. Don't put line breaks in paragraphs, as those will break text flow and always start a new line. Every paragraph should be a single line of text in gemtext. Typically paragraphs are separated by two newline characters, i.e., one blank line. Also, on the capsule front page, you need to remove space from list bullet lines. Gemtext parsers do not trim whitespace before detecting line types, so those bullets will be shown as regular text lines.
When it comes to games beyond casual small ones like SpellBinding, Farkle, or Minesweeper (which currently exist and are rather playable) the problem is that as the game complexity increases, you'll have a difficult time presenting that via gemtext. Also, anything happening in real time or as a collaboration between players is greatly inconvenienced by only having manual reloads. That friction combined with the inherent "non-stickiness" of Gemini may make it a challenge to implement anything more complex on Gemini.
Personally, I fondly remember a play-by-email game called VGA Planets from the 90s that was one of those space strategy 4X games. Something akin to it, perhaps simplified a bit, might be doable.
🚀 mbays · 2025-07-27 at 05:01:
I remember OGame! It was fun at the time, but I think unhealthy in the way it demanded your attention. I don't think anything so complicated would play well on gemini, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. You should however take seriously solderpunk's advice about not investing time developing something if it will only be worth it for you if there are many players. I've written quite a few gemini games by now, and the usual pattern is for a handful of people to try them out when first released, then on the order of one little interaction a month after that. Most of them I wrote mostly for myself and/or my SO, so that's ok with me. But you should expect disappointment.
I think he's also right that many people on gemini are trying to get away from unhealthy internet use, so the OGame-like pattern which requires you to work the game into your day would likely not go down well. Even committing to take a turn every day would I suspect be too much.
zzo38 already touched on this but why do we need games over the Gemini protocol? It’s designed to be used by a client such that a single request results in an atomic and complete response. Typically something you spend several minutes reading before making another.
If you really want a TUI game, why not telnet/ssh which are better suited for rapid back and forth.
Not intended as a criticism, more trying to understand why we need to add some particular thing over this protocol. Personally I’d rather keep each simple, and use specific protocols for specific activities.
🚀 adavies [OP] · 2025-07-28 at 00:27:
@skyjake : Thanks for the advice on the capsule! Regarding the difficulty of presentation, yes, indeed is not the same as doing it with HTML+CSS+JS but thats part of the fun of the challenge (I guess?). BTW I did not know about VGA Planets - Searched it and looked really cool!
🚀 adavies [OP] · 2025-07-28 at 00:29:
@mbays : Hey! Thanks for the comment. Yes, I did think about it, and if I were to implement any of this options, I should reduce the online dependency to a minimum (and maybe that takes part of the fun away, idk?). But totally agreed that the majority of ppl in here are trying to reduce their internet consumption, not just looking for a web alternative.
🚀 adavies [OP] · 2025-07-28 at 00:31:
@sbr : Thanks for the comment! Yes, I understand that for a lot of ppl , games do not belong in gemini, thats why I wanted to open this discussion and see what is the community opinion. I think that the challenge to implement it here would be fun, but I think that (like Solderpunk's post says) I would be just doing it for me.
🌲 lojikil · 2025-07-31 at 07:50:
This post and others like it are part of what made me think about adding support for Gopher+-style interactive queries; I think with just a few additions, you could have a pretty browser-neutral way of supporting more complex input from users, without requiring much support from the client side. gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/u/lojikil/30755
😈 dimkr · 2025-07-31 at 13:46:
I had a checkers game but I took it down due to low demand, should I bring it back?
🦂 zzo38 · 2025-07-31 at 19:14:
If a Pokemon game by correspondence play (with perhaps a minimum of 12 hours per turn and a maximum of a much longer time) is made with Gemini then I might look.
You could have a ASCII text describing the current game state and the battle log, and using Titan to upload the team (except for random battle mode). For making the move you can use a short notation that I have the idea of: "a" to "d" for the four move slots, "e" to "h" for the four active pokemons (only relevant in a double battle), "i" to "n" for your six pokemons in your team, and further characters to specify mega-evolution, Z-moves, etc. For example, "ahj" might be a valid command in a double battle, meaning: your first active pokemon selects its first move slot targeting the fourth position, and your second active pokemon switches to the second pokemon in your team.
🐙 norayr · 2025-08-02 at 01:36:
if there's low demand it is one more reason to keep it: not much load.
even if nobody plays it, sole existence of such capsule makes geminispare more lively, shows that there are options and shows how such game would look and work like.
i am a big proponent of keeping everything alive and i am at the same time not sure we all should even want software as a service games and many other programs.
but that is a different different topic.
👾 jecxjo · 2025-08-03 at 16:55:
Got some UI working for "Space Yahtzee". Will have to find a better name.
☯️ dragfyre · 2025-08-04 at 11:50:
hmm, i haven't added my two cents yet.
i love smol games, have loved them since i was a kid making goofy joke programs in BASIC on an Apple //e.
Everything I've made so far, from bots to CGI scripts, has been for myself because i love it and want it around. if other people want it too, then so much the better. i guess that kind of directs where i put my (already quite limited) free time, because i'm not likely to take on something that i won't enjoy myself. 🤷♂️
🐑 zipsegv · 2025-08-09 at 08:20:
I think Gemini games are kind of cool; it's cool to see what people can do given the limits of the protocol. I think games would best be text-based though and try to limit the use of graphics (e.g. via preformatted blocks); that preserves accessibility so anyone can play. As well as that, games should be slow-paced; one should be able to ignore the game for a few days and be able to drop back in where they were not having missed anything. I think something paced similar to nationstates would work well, where you handle a few events every day, but you can skip days or weeks and just handle them later if you want.
I've seen an idea for a Pokémon-like suggested above, and I think that could work (perhaps every day you could get a new encounter or something?) although I would try to simplify the control scheme as much as possible while still keeping it fun.
In addition, I think multiplayer games should always be playable even if there's a single active user. ideally multiplayer games would be "optionally multiplayer" where there can be player interaction but the core of the game works whether there's other players or not. (in the case of a Pokémon-style game, I'd think being able to "challenge" other players to a battle would suit this)
Original Post
— On Gemini Games [adavies.foo]
On Gemini Games — Hello everyone! Im new to the geminispace , and I could not avoid to note that there are not much games here. The idea of having more games here, and the ability to implement them, is something that really interests me, so I made a posts about it in my capsule: I would love you to read it and let me know what you think! I do believe that this would be a really nice addition to Gemini.