What is this thing, and who made it?

Goddard Withings: The Not-Yet-Famous Explorer is a free, browser-based, choose-your-own-adventure text comedy set in a sci-fi galaxy that takes itself less seriously than it should. It's an unapologetic love letter to the Sierra adventure games of the 90s (Space Quest in particular), to Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and to the long tradition of text adventures that reward stupid choices with funny scenes.

There's no winning. There's no losing. There are six endings, each more morally questionable than the last, and a lot of jokes about bureaucracy, marshmallows, and getting into ships you almost certainly don't own.

Who made it

Hi — I'm Adam Aragon. I write, design, build things, and have spent a suspicious amount of my career adjacent to FinTech, cybersecurity, planning software, and data infrastructure (none of which prepared me for writing about love-potion auctions).

Goddard Withings started as a small Twine project in 2024, sat half-finished for a long while, and got dragged across the finish line over the next few years one passage at a time. The voice is mine. The dumb jokes are mine. The structural decisions are mine. The Marshmallow Men are also deeply mine.

How it's made

The game itself is built on:

• Twine 2 with the Harlowe 3 story format — a battle-tested open-source toolkit for hypertext fiction. The Harlowe macros power every branching link, every conditional dialogue line, every text-shudder, every fade-in.
• The harlowe-audio plugin (with Howler.js) for the soundtrack and ambient sound effects.
• A custom Python pipeline for batch-generating and managing the per-passage illustrations, with prompts built from passage content plus a consistent style prefix and per-character visual reference.
• Hosted on DigitalOcean App Platform with auto-deploy from GitHub on every push to main. Pure static hosting. No backend, no database, no telemetry, no ads.

Inspirations

• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) — for the narrator's smarmy parenthetical asides and the universe's general unwillingness to make sense.
• Space Quest series (Sierra) — for the protagonist who is fundamentally a janitor in space-explorer clothing.
• The Stanley Parable — for the fourth wall, what wall.
• 80 Days (Inkle) — for proving that text adventures can still look stunning.
• Every Sierra adventure game where you could die from doing something completely reasonable.

Credits

• Writing, design, code, illustrations, soundtrack: Adam Aragon
• Engine: Twine 2 / Harlowe 3 (open source)
• Audio plugin: harlowe-audio by ChapelR (open source)
• Soundtrack: original composition (two chapter themes plus mood tracks)

License

The source code is released into the public domain (Unlicense). The illustrations, soundtrack, characters, and writing are not public domain — they're original creative works. Feel free to fork the code, ape the structure, or learn from the prompt scripts. Please don't republish the story or art as your own.

Contact & feedback

Found a bug? Have a feature request? Want to argue about which ending is the "right" one?

• Email: [email protected]
• GitHub issues: github.com/adamaragon/Goddard-Withings/issues