dsh-gal

A galgame / visual-novel UI for the DeepSeek Harness (dsh), packaged as a dsh plugin.

Your agent becomes a whale girl. Each reply plays as a dialogue scene — typewriter text, one turn at a time, no scrolling wall of history — while she reacts with animated expressions chosen by an emotion judge. The backlog is one click away, just like a real visual novel.

What it does

• Scene-at-a-time dialogue — only the latest exchange is on screen, rendered with a typewriter effect. Long replies page like VN text boxes (click / Space to advance, Auto mode available).
• Animated whale girl — six expressions (neutral, happy, thinking, surprised, sad, excited), each a looping micro-animation (Seedance 2.0 mini / MiniMax H3 image-to-video on fal.ai, from AI-generated base sprites); layers cross-fade on emotion change.
• Emotion judge — after each assistant turn, a tiny side LLM call classifies the reply's tone into one of the six expressions; a keyword heuristic covers fallback. While the agent works, she switches to thinking and a status ticker shows tool activity.

• Backlog — press L or click History for the full scrollable conversation log.

  

• Drive the session from the UI — the input box sends real user turns into the live dsh session.

Install

git clone https://github.com/william-jin-cmu/dsh-gal
cd dsh-gal && ./scripts/build.sh   # links against your dsh checkout and compiles src/ → lib/

Register it in ~/.dsh/cordis.patch.yml (older builds: ~/.dsh/config.yaml):

- insert:
    - id: dsh-gal
      name: /absolute/path/to/dsh-gal/lib/index.js
      config:
        port: 4877          # UI at http://127.0.0.1:4877/
        characterName: Cetus

Start dsh web as usual and open http://127.0.0.1:4877/. If no session is open yet, the first message you send opens one on your default model — the novel is playable standalone.

Configuration

Regenerating the art

The sprites and motion loops ship with the repo, but everything is reproducible:

• Base sprite + expression variants: any strong image model — generate one base portrait, then edit it per expression with the base as reference so the character stays consistent
• Micro-animations: scripts/animate.sh <sprite.png> <out.mp4> "<motion prompt>" [h3] — Seedance 2.0 mini image-to-video on fal.ai (bytedance/seedance-2.0/mini/image-to-video, 720p ≈ $0.15/s) by default, MiniMax H3 (minimax/h3/image-to-video, 768P) with the h3 arg

License

BSD-3-Clause