Insults & Cutlasses, Local LLM Sword Fighting on Melee Island

raslanove Posted on May 25 Insults & Cutlasses, Local LLM Sword Fighting on Melee Island # devchallenge # gemmachallenge # gemma Gemma 4 Challenge: Build With Gemma 4 Submission This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 What I Built Insults & Cutlasses is a terminal-based insult sword fighting game inspired by The Secret of Monkey Island . The player enters a world where victory is not achieved through brute force, but through witty insults, structured comebacks, and AI-judged verbal duels . Each battle follows a strict loop: The opponent generates an insult The player responds with a comeback A judge evaluates whether the response is strong or weak Points are awarded accordingly First to 3 points wins the duel After each victory or defeat, a new pirate opponent appears and the journey continues toward the Swordmaster of Melee Island. This project explores how local LLMs can power structured gameplay systems , turning natural language into a competitive game mechanic rather than a free-form chatbot. Demo Code GitHub repository: https://github.com/raslanove/InsultsAndCutlasses How I Used Gemma 4 This project is powered by Gemma 4 E2B IT (quantized GGUF version) . I chose the E2B model because: It has a small enough memory footprint to run locally without a GPU It performs well on CPU-only environments (even consumer laptops) It maintains strong instruction-following behavior compared to other small models It is ideal for embedding into real-time interactive applications like games Why Gemma 4 was essential Earlier small models struggled with: Consistent roleplay behavior Structured output formats Maintaining "pirate duel logic" across turns Gemma 4 significantly improved: Instruction adherence for strict insult/reply/judge formatting Stability in multi-turn interactions Creativity in generating themed pirate insults and comebacks Fine-tuning (LoRA) To make the model behave like a true Monkey Island-style insult duel system , I trained