After an eight year break, I’ve written another text adventure game for Ludum Dare 53. I didn’t quite make the deadline for either the 48-hour Comp or the 72-hour Jam, but these days they have an Extra category with a very generous three week deadline, and I managed to squeeze into that.

Causality Couriers can be played over here. Its Ludum Dare page is here. It was made with Gruescript, a point-and-click text adventure creator.

The development of this piece was an exercise in (1) using Gruescript and (2) using AI. Most noticeably, illustrations for the story have been generated with Stable Diffusion. All the prose is mine, but I used ChatGPT as a creative consultant throughout the writing process – it was the AI that came up with the notion of a time-travelling courier in the first place.

I have tested it a fair bit, but probably not exhaustively, so you may encounter some bugs. I’ll put up a more detailed post-mortem after Ludum Dare 53 officially ends on 20 May.