Hello there! I’m back with another text adventure game (;
“Spirit of Hunger” is set in the Late Victorian England. You play as a spirit awakened by the growing appetite of Eleanor, a recently hired museum assistant.
For this first chapter, you are able to explore her apartment, manipulate objects, witness past events, and much, much more! The important thing is that, for better or worse, every action you take will have a direct influence on Eleanor.
As with Emily’s Midnight Snack, you can play on my itchio:
I think this introduction is good enough. The next sections are about the more technical aspects of the game - still mostly spoiler-free of course, but you might want to take a look at the game first to get what I’m talking about.
WRITING STYLE
As you can see, I went for a much different writing style that the one used in “Emily’s Midnight Snack”. It’s not in first person anymore! Well, it is, but you’re not the one eating this time around.
Now, I don’t want to exclude that kind of POV from the rest of the game, as I still think it’s got a lot of potential. I am planning to have some sections where you are able to “see” through Eleanor’s eyes in the next chapter (you can already get a little taste of it in the terrace).
Just wanted to try something different, which is why I’ve also attempted to write in a Victorian style as well. Was I able to manage it? Hell no! It wasn’t that bad to write like this (I’m not a native English speaker, they basically trained me on 19th british novels for most of my high-school years), but I’m sure there are plenty of style errors, anachronisms, and objects that belong to a later period or a previous one. If you spot any, let me know!
GAME DESIGN/TIMELINE
Alright, so, I might take a little break from this game before heading into the second chapter. Why? Well, adding all of those object interactions and conditional texts took a lot out of me. Definitely worth it, though.
I do have a lot of things planned! It took me a while to get that Seeker of Gluttony update, but I did. I will come back to this project.
Ah, I should probably mention that in its current state, the game has 3 endings! One is canon, the other a “failure” state, and one secret, as a bonus (:
AI DISCLAIMER
I already wrote a section on my use of AI for this game in the about section, so I will just copy it word for word:
For transparency’s sake, I do want to make clear that I did employ the use of Large Language Models (AIs), to get some help with coding, and for gathering some knowledge on late Victorian times. I did not use it to make my text feel more Victorian or anything like that - that I tried, and it only made things look and feel very, very repetitive and overall bloated.
But! I did experiment with having some passages be written by the computer. Fear not, it almost always had to be either scrapped, as the AI did not understand the deeper context and underlying story, or be re-written.
Truthfully, some of that experimentation did lead to some interesting ideas and descriptions of things, and so was added to the game - once more though, it always went through a lot of changes by my hand, and in almost all cases it scarcely resembled the original generated text.
I will never employ the use of generated images in any of my works.
There has been a little bit of beta testing, but I’m sure there are still a ton of random little bugs around. If you find any, let me know! I should note that as I update the game to fix them, your save files might become unusable. Not always though, only if I have to rework some variables - I will warn you in a changelog when I do that.
Have fun!
