A fallen Star needs to defeat the Darkness threatening the kingdom so they can go home to the sky.Â
Will you follow the prophecy, or break free from fate and choose your own path?
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Starlit Void is a story driven RPG in which Spica, a young Star who just fell from the sky, is tasked with saving the world from a mysterious Darkness taking over it.
Follow Spica as they learn about the beauty and horrors the world has to offer.Â
When interacting with the world, they will feel Hope and Despair. Will they stay hopeful through their journey, or crack under the pressure?
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My game Starlit Void is now out for FREE on itch.io! I've been working on it for about a year now and it's been a blast. I'm really happy with how it turned out and I can't wait to see people playing it!
It features 3 whole endings, blue hair and pronouns, speedrunning depression and also cool art I made myself.
Thank you for your support, and have fun playing! :)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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SPOILERS FOR STARLIT VOID AHEAD. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I thought too much about Mira before everything happened, because they clearly weren't always a black hole. I tried to mimic the shape of Mira's cape from the fight, but otherwise gave myself artistic freedom to do as I wished. Look at them, they used to be so happy.
@emberconstellation it seems like you like seeing fanart
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
I knew for a fact that for volume 3, I had to cover a twitter bot. Come hang with me and starlit void for a while and see why---
The boom of Creative Writing Twitter is a natural extension of how we communicate today: quickly, constantly, concisely, urgently.
But short doesnât mean simple: following the ethos of writing (or subverting) formal verse poetry, the restraints of Twitter often produce the most creative content. Among them are many creative writing-oriented twitterbots. These clusters of code generate tweets following a certain linguistic--and sometimes also visual--structure a set amount of times per day. Some results are "betterâ (more beautiful, or more hilarious, or more surprising, or more mundane, or more....) than others, but itâs always enchanting to watch unfold.
The dependable, structured presence of twitterbots--however unexpected the results---on our feeds makes them eventually feel like a friend---oddly human.
One creative writing bot that stands out to me is starlit voidâs quietscape--the bot pairs a colorful, randomly generated, geometric digital landscape picture with a short, fantastical suggestion/description. Each tweet creates an environment for thoughts to exist in, like a creative writing prompt. At least for me, it serves an essential meditative function within hectic internet space.
I knew that my conversation with starlit void would be a rad discussion about writing and tech, but it bloomed into so much more: an oral history of bot world, seriously cool meditations on mental health, Soundcloud playlist suggestions, + more! Keeping with the futurelit tradition (and my own personal tradition), we avoided a phone call and did our chat over Twitter DMs this time:
what is your favorite environment to create in? (whether it's a certain physical space, listening to a certain kind of music/silence, etc.)Â
i typically like to be well-caffeinated, alone or in a cafe, & excited about getting something working.... there's a thin line between excited & stressed about how something is going to turn out. i used to go to "game jams" until i discovered it was actually really stressful for me. i'm trying to be more relaxed about my creative output (this is easier said than done) & trying to avoid equating prolificness w/ human value. i think i do my best work when the intended audience is very selective, even 1 or 2 people, or just for myself. i also listen to what i call "robot music" a lot, for example this sort of mix.
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tell me a little bit about how you came up with your bot 'quietscape' -- what were your inspirations for it?
as i believe you had already guessed, @quietscape was first intended as a prompt bot, for getting some creative thoughts limbered up.
at first the output was text only, which was easy to do using tracery (TRACERY PLUG: tracery by @galaxykate along w/ http://cheapbotsdonequick.com by @v21 are hands down the greatest twitterbot making tools around, lowering bar to entry for many many people into the complex world of botmakery).
i think at first i did use a few of them as prompts, but quietscape was ultimately too bland & not interesting enough. i added the raytraced images as a proof-of-concept & it's remained almost unchanged ever since. quietscape is still a work in progress!!!!! of course after adding images i came up w/ a huge complex system of how this takes place on a mysterious earth-sized artifact orbiting a binary star system blah blah blah but i felt it was more important to synchronize tweets to my own daytime schedule. i found some code to roughly calculate sunlight intensity & sunrise/sunset times at roughly my latitude for a planet that's roughly earthlike & that was "good enough"!
the schedule is also in line w/ some of my thoughts on bot tweeting volumes. i like that quietscape only tweets 5 times a day (dawn, afternoon, dusk, midnight, & a daily "shrine" tweet), which i think helps keep xem from getting too familiar or overstaying xyr welcome.
i love procedural generation but our minds can feel out the recurring pattern of a bot very quickly, even if there are 50 bazillion possible combinations, which sounds good on paper but doesn't actually provide human quality variety in the output. my partial answer was to make a terse bot. as far as actual inspirations go: quietscape owes quite a lot to tsutomu nihei's architectural renderings, @katierosepipkin & @lorenschmidt's collaborative work, and @edclef & @davidkanaga's game _proteus_. the daily "shrine" tweets are thanks to @trapitolina's @obelisk_bot, which got me thinking about adding more of a physical location feel to quietscape.
what do you love most about coding as an art/writing form, and how did you get into it?
i see generative & algorithm-assisted creativity as a vast & mostly untapped field, where the product isn't really the product, but a wild & nearly organic factory that can make lots of weird & surprising things.
i think @katierosepipkin said it best in their interview:
"Here, the cartographer draws the cliffs that contain a sea of one hundred thousand artworks. And then one searches for the most beautiful piece of coral inside of their waters."
this resonates w/ me, especially this feedback loop of curated generation (generate a huge number of results & then pick out the best ones). of course that's hard to do when making a bot that supposedly exists independent of human interference. there are a lot of successful procedurally generated experiences out there & yet i think there is much to be learned about how we can work hand-in-hand w/ computers to make more human accessible works. @emshort explores this a whole bunch in her notes following the text of "the annals of the parrigues"Â (see page 81), "the state of the roads", & it's really eye-opening & exciting.
on the other end of the spectrum, it's exciting to me that there are several wonderful tools available for picking up rule-based creativity & just making it. i would love to make tools that help people get started down the road of algorithmic creativity. i would love to see more voices using these techniques.
I can't help but notice that your 'quietscape' website is hosted on neocities---were you into geocities when you were younger? and if so, do you have any cool memories about it? (or about any other piece of the internet that's not around anymore that you're nostalgic for?)
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sure!!! i had a geocities site & i'm still known to gawk in awe at mid-90s web aesthetics. but even more important than that, i think it's crucial we move away from centralized conglomerate based media platforms for our creative output. html remains a viable technology for sharing ideas & presenting them online, & to get started you just need to copy paste some nearly-human-readible code. returning to lists of url links & webrings & simple web crawlers as the means to discover other sites.... it's not democratic or equal in any sense, but in hindsight it seems better than entrusting your content to an algorithm w/ an intrinsic corporate bias. geocities was the era during which we were sure that the internet had come to free us all from ignorance & relying on centralized systems. 20 years later, 3 or 4 companies control almost everything you do online. the bleak cyberpunk corporate surveillance police state of the 80s is happening instead. i'd love to go back to those innocent days & work for a better distribution of technology. or breaking systems down, i don't know. relying on systems is killing us.
which projects are you currently working on, or would like to in the near future?
the big theme of what it would be like to live in a weird endless megastructure has haunted me for about 15 years so i'll probably still find ways to explore that in future work. the two other forces that draw me kind of go hand in hand but they're also kind of opposite. i'd like to put more of myself in my work, & focus on some of the changes & revelations i've had over the past few years (gender, sexuality, identity in general). but also i'd like to address bigger issues, like stepping down & propping up marginalized voices.
post an image/images that feels like 'the future' to you
(x)
love mushbush's work & it feels out of time & futuristic in a playful way!
The side characters!!! I'm so in love with each of them. This is gonna be a bit long, sorry in advance! Also, spoiler warning, but Iâm gonna be paraphrasing several quotes from memory!
Kuna and the PTPS! Sheâs so fun. I loved the side quest, and the reveal that the tree was there all along! I always love a character whoâs obsessed with something as a coping mechanism. Also, her book being able to be given to Azmidi was so wonderful â when I was playing the despair route and she mentioned wanting a new book I knew I wasnât going to be able to get it to her, but I wanted sooooo badly to help them out. I had to use the guide a bit for that, and it let me know some fun stuff like the secret passage!
Azmidi, now. Wow, I loved finding stuff out about her through conversations with Lost in particular. Actually, this can be a general analysis para since characters like Lost and Az are so connected. The ten stories got me theorizing like a madman. Certainly, Lost seems to be the one before The First, the one who landed in the sea. And Azâs story was wild â reaching that tapestry in the castle and seeing âThat⌠doesnât seem rightâ wrt VastĂŠriâs backstory had me gnashing my teeth. Ohhhh and âdo you ever get lonely?â Wrt lost! And the diary on Azâs nightstand! They probably canât come live with me. Itâs been twelve years, so they should be coming soon. You should go see her! Maybe, maybe. God, this nb/nb yuri (to me) william-year-slowburn romantic drama goes so hard. And they both lost their Shepards, but in completely different ways! Of course theyâre different â Lost didnât even know he had a Shepard, much less lost them. And Az worked so so so so hard to finish their wish, but it wasnât possible. So Greek tragedy of them.
And the differences between Lost and Mira!!!!! God, my poor friends have been subjected enough to my yapping about this. They both lost their light. It makes me crazy. But Lost wasnât subjected to the trauma and torture that Mira was, and they eventually had Az! Theyâre completely different in their relationship with the world and with connections, but so similar in their outcomes â stuck stars, lost light, endless listening. I have a lot of lore questions regarding the eating starlight thing: it could be just a joke about black holes, or it could be about how, after turning into black holes, they are constantly craving connection even more so than the non-turned stars. AlsoâŚ. Lost knows the difference in taste between Darkness and Star-given starlight. Hm. So many stars fell⌠Iâm curious how he got to taste it before Mira escaped.
Similarly⌠There are so many darknesses that are turned conscious. And their names: nebula, asteroid, comet, etc etc⌠are they just unfinished stars that fell, or are they something else entirely? Is it a situation like the tree, where Darkness somehow simply possessed a previously soulless Cosmos-fallen thing?
Also. I donât know if you count this as a character or not. But The Cosmos. It is what I would consider to be Starlit Voidâs equivalence to God, and it is so interesting to me. Itâs not kind. Itâs not benevolent at all, actually, even when itâs helping. It just is. It follows some sort of logic or rule pattern that it itself is bound to, and itâs not all powerful in that sense. However, it has some level of emotion â it grants the Stars for wishes. It made love. It guaranteed to Az a successful destruction of the Darkness. Still, it allowed the torture Mira went through. And it refuses the Stars back into itself. And it sent every Star from where they belonged down to the earth. What a good portrayal of an imperfect god!
Anyways, I just wanted to say thank you again! I really, really enjoyed this game. Have a good day/night!
Thank you for your wonderful analysis!!!
I love Lost and Azmidi ... Their relationship is very interesting to me. I really want to explore it more eventually! I'm really glad you got the nb/nb yuri vibe!!
For the Darkness, the idea was that it was created by Mira's magic, and it resembles stuff you can find in space (comets, planets, galaxies, etc) because Mira misses the sky, so his magic takes the shape of what he wants the most. Also it just looked cool!
Thank you for playing and giving me your thoughts on the game!! :)
