This is not a game. Well, it sorta is, but not really...
The irony aside, Crawl Code puts a dungeon crawler on top of Ollama. Every prompt moves you deeper. Monsters show up. An Oracle answers your code questions in Middle English. You were already typing into the void — now the void hits back.
Built for fun.
- First-person dungeon — Simplified DDA raycasting renderer with distance-based shading, rendered in ANSI truecolor
- 30 pixel-art monsters — Extracted from sprite sheets, rendered as background-colored blocks
- RPG progression — HP, MP, XP, leveling (1-10), weapon drops, crypto currency
- Procedural maze — Single winding path with no branches for simplicity, auto-generates new floors
- Ollama integration — Wraps any Ollama model, streams responses, strips thinking blocks
- Oracle persona — AI responds as an ancient dungeon Oracle addressing you as "Chosen One"
- Zero dependencies beyond Node.js — No native modules, no blessed, pure ANSI terminal control
Make sure Ollama is running and npm is installed.
npx tsx src/crawl-ollama.ts <name-of-model>Example:
npx tsx src/crawl-ollama.ts glm-5.1:cloud| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Type + Enter | Sending prompt to Ollama advances dungeon |
quit / exit |
Exit |
| Ctrl+C (x2) | Force exit |
┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│ First-person dungeon viewport │ ← DDA raycaster, ANSI truecolor
│ (monster sprites overlay here) │
├──────────────────────────────────┤
│ Player: Sorcerer, Lvl 3 │ NPC: Kermit Loss
│ HP ██████████ 85/100 │ HP ██████ 12/30
│ MP ██████████ 100% │ ⚔ Combat!
│ XP ████░░░░░░ 350/500 │
│ Equipped: [Dragon Claw] │
│ Crypto: 47 │
├──────────────────────────────────┤
│ ⟫ You step forward. A Kermit │ ← Events in chat flow
│ Loss lurches from shadows! │
│ │
│ >>> how do I sort a list │ ← Your prompt
│ Hark, Chosen One! The Scroll │ ← Oracle response
│ of Algorithms doth reveal... │
│ │
│ ⟫ You swing at Kermit Loss │ ← Combat event
│ for 14. It strikes back. │
│ │
│ >>> │ ← Next prompt
└──────────────────────────────────┘
Every exchange with the Oracle:
- Your prompt is sent to Ollama
- Oracle responds in Middle English
- You step forward in the dungeon
- Monster may appear (~25% chance)
- Combat auto-resolves over multiple exchanges
- XP accumulates, weapons drop on kills
| Level | Title | XP Required |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sorcerer | 0 |
| 2 | Sorcerer | 100 |
| 3 | Sorcerer | 200 |
| 4 | Sorcerer | 500 |
| 5 | Sorcerer Adept | 1,000 |
| 6 | Sorcerer Adept | 2,000 |
| 7 | Sorcerer Adept | 5,000 |
| 8 | Sorcerer Adept | 10,000 |
| 9 | Sorcerer Adept | 20,000 |
| 10 | High Sorcerer | 50,000 |
Start with Boring Wand. Defeat monsters for a chance to find:
- Elven Wand of Tokenization
- Dragon Claw of Attention
- Hellstaff of Hallucination
- Phoenix Rod of Fine-Tuning
- Staff of Reinforcement Learning
- Wand of Emergent Behavior
| Monster | Description |
|---|---|
| Hyperparameter Ranger | Roams the dungeon endlessly, never quite finding the optimal path |
| Lord Vanishing | Grows weaker with every layer until he simply ceases to exist |
| Gandalf Hinton | Ancient wizard, father of dark magic, recently left his tower |
| BERT Golem | Understands everything you say but only in both directions |
| Sir Dropout | Randomly disappears mid-fight, claims it makes him stronger |
| Baron Hallucinate | States false things with absolute confidence |
| Stochastic Sally | Never attacks the same way twice, occasionally hits herself |
| Private Bias | Insists he's fair while clearly favoring one side |
| Shadow Latent | You can't see him directly, only his representation |
| Sporacles Softmax | Distributes damage across the whole party, never commits |
| Gelu Ooze | Smooth and nonlinear, slightly better than its cousin ReLU Slime |
| Raspberry Pifiend | Small, underpowered, runs hot, refuses to die |
| Sssscalar Green | Just a single number but somehow still dangerous |
| Basilissk Purple | One look at its weights and you're frozen |
| AARDMAx | Takes the biggest value and ignores everything else |
| Kermit Loss | It's not easy minimizing green |
| Pincer Pruning | Snips away anything it deems unnecessary, including your limbs |
| Queen Thiccarus | Massively overparameterized, flies too close to overfitting |
| Cycloptimus | One-eyed optimizer, always looking for the minimum |
| Fenrir GAN | Generates wolves indistinguishable from real ones |
| Echo Encoder | Repeats everything back at you in a lower dimension |
| Antenna Dave | Picks up every signal, most of them noise |
| Python Constrictor | Wraps around you in whitespace-sensitive coils |
| Cluckster Stopper | A chicken that terminates training early |
| Dead Neurons | Just stand there. Do nothing. Forever |
| Squeaknet | Tiny model, surprisingly effective, annoyingly loud |
| Ghoulash | A hash collision in undead form |
| Slug Convergence | Approaches you very, very, very slowly |
| Noisy Bat | Injects random perturbations into everything it touches |
| Condor Vulture | Circles overhead waiting for your gradient to die |
- TypeScript — all source
- DDA Raycasting — Wolfenstein 3D-style column renderer
- ANSI truecolor — 24-bit background colors, scroll regions
- Ollama REST API —
/api/chatendpoint with streaming - No native deps — runs anywhere Node.js runs
- Node.js 18+
- Ollama installed and running.
- Terminal with truecolor support (iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty, Windows Terminal)
- Monster sprites by IvoryRed — PICO-8 character sprites used for the pixel-art monsters in this demo
- Banner font — Ransite Medieval by mn.sg used in the cover image
- Inspired by Might and Magic (1986), Eye of the Beholder (1991), and Dungeon Master (1987)