Credits
Story, script, game design, programming and graphics: Simone Pizzi, for Runtime Multimedia. Original music: Alirio Bruni. Voices: Leonardo Tomassetti (William T. Eriksonn), Olivia Quattrocchi (Burcu Akkaya), Deborah Piu (Hilde Berg), Simone Pizzi (Yusuf). The music and the voice work were given for free.
Technology
The game is an Electron application written in TypeScript with React and built with Vite. The interface is hand-written CSS, with no styling libraries. It runs entirely on your machine: it asks for no connection, sends nothing anywhere and needs no account. The site you are reading is generated with Astro; the typefaces are VT323 and Share Tech Mono.
What is not generated
No artificial intelligence runs inside the game. Every line, every description and every response to a command was written in advance by a person and is always the same: what you read on board is not invented while you play. The voices are recordings of actors. The music is composed.
What is generated
The images: the rooms of the ship, the inventory objects, the portraits, the cover. They are produced with generative models and then chosen, cropped, corrected and redone until they said the right thing. They are also the project's only real expense, and that is where donations go.
Development tools
The code is written with the assistance of large language models, currently Claude Opus 4.8 and Fable 5, under the author's direction and inside a working protocol set down in writing: the design documents are the only source of truth, every change carries a version number and a work note, and nothing enters the game without being read back. The long version of how this way of working came about is on the Story page.
The saga
Il Relitto Silente (a text adventure, free and open source) and Frequenza di Servizio (a short story) come before this game. The Safe Place Chronicles is Runtime's other project, likewise free and open source.