Ghost in the Code: an offline programming-history game run on a local AI model

Ghost in the Code is a local-first educational game that presents itself as an old computer terminal, where players summon fictional spirits modeled on historical languages such as COBOL, BASIC, and Assembly. Players can chat with these spirits about computing history and work through six debugging puzzles covering loops, conditionals, state, and recursion, earning XP and other progression rewards. The game runs entirely offline once the user installs Ollama and pulls the default qwen2.5:1.5b model, chosen to suit modest hardware, and no prompts leave the user's machine. Progress is stored in the browser's localStorage, and all generated replies are labeled as fiction. The project was built as an entry for a Hacktoberfest open-source AI challenge, and its code is publicly available on GitHub.