Changelog

🔊 Voiced narration mode

Every passage can now read itself aloud. A new Narrate toggle and mute button sit in the bottom-left of the play screen. Each character speaks in their own voice — Goddard's drawl, Karl's grumble, BoB's chipper static, The Countess's poise, Wyoming's swagger — performed in-line with the prose, including inline cues like [chuckles], [whispers], and [pause]. When you reach an ending, a theme song rolls. Narration is on by default for first-time visitors; opt out anytime and the choice persists.

Under the hood: the Opening passage's narration is pre-rendered and served from the CDN for instant playback; everything else is streamed on demand from a tiny new Node proxy on App Platform. Streaming bytes start arriving in under a second on most passages, where the older approach took four to ten.

🎻 Pugsworth, the cross-arc ending & canon polish

The two big mid-game arcs — the love-potion catalyst path and the Hatchet's Rest Lullaby path — now have a hidden third way: if you carry pieces of both back to Hilde Mossback, she reveals that the same monastic order made each, two thousand years apart, for the same purpose. A new character on Hatchet's Rest, Captain Pugsworth Glim, plays the first two measures of the Lullaby on his accordion and will not play the third. Finding the third unlocks the cleanest of the new endings.

Plus eight new endings sweeping the tone spectrum from cheerful pastel body horror to nihilistic insurance-rebuilds-tomorrow to a hallucinogenic everything-at-once. A canon pass aligned all expansion years to the story's actual 3232 setting, and the narration engine learned a dozen new performance cues — BoB now properly [chirps], Pugsworth properly [sighs], Wyoming properly [menacing].

🏛 The Heist — Chapter 8½

A new mid-Chapter-8 sequence: an actual break-in on the Jones Tower. Recruit Doris from the Bureau lobby (she has been carrying the wrong tie color since 3189 and would like to discuss it), bring Edgar Pomp for the inside knowledge, swap the ceremonial vial before the Gala. Three outcomes — clean swap, fumbled-but-saved, and caught. Caught isn't game over; it's its own ending branch.

🗃 The Other Guild — Bureau of Adventurer Affairs

A second guild exists. It is in a sub-basement. It is run by an octogenarian named Hilde Mossback who has a pipe (called The Notary) and a card system that classifies you by what you do wrong. Sneak past the front desk on Guild day to find the boiler room, read an archive on a man named Wyoming Jones, and either accept Misadventurer Card #00048 or politely decline. Two of the new finales route through here.

🤖 BoB the HelperBot — mini-arc

One of the ship's library shelves has a HelperBot decommissioned for asking too many questions. He still asks. The conversation that follows depends on whether you engage or change the subject — and if you do engage, BoB shows up later, eight stories above the ground, in a Tower maintenance vent. He has more questions now.

🛎 The aggressive pop-up that does not let go

Click the FREE DESTINY ad in your apartment and you get followed across the galaxy. It gets a name. It gets a hat. It gets features. By Chapter 8 it has opinions. Banishment is an option but — true to the genre — banishment is never permanent. Watch the corner of your vision in the bathroom mirror.

🌿 Plot expansion: alt branch, maze rework, callbacks

37 new passages and 5 new endings. The story now meaningfully branches on the Chapter-2 ship choice: one of the two ships opens up an entire alternate finale arc set on a retirement planet for ex-adventurers, with its own NPCs, its own macguffin, its own moral choices, and a possible crossover ending that intersects the main plot. The jungle maze got a proper rework — hidden items, a secret room, an inventory display, and a fourth-wall-breaking escape hatch if you wander too long. Several characters now have callbacks across chapters: Mom finally answers if you keep calling, Karl reappears on Adventure Prime, Mr. Brindles has a quiet revelation about his family. Plus a handful of small player-pranks and weak-choice strengthening.

🌐 Full website shell & SEO pass

The game now lives at /play/ with a real marketing site around it: home, how-to-play, changelog, about. Every page gets full SEO treatment — semantic HTML, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Schema.org structured data (VideoGame, HowTo, BreadcrumbList), sitemap, robots.txt, and a consistent cinematic dark theme that matches the game's aesthetic.

🔗 Canonical URLs & social-card polish

Added <link rel="canonical"> so platforms key the OG cache cleanly when scraping. Cleaned the page <title> (was Twine's default with a leading space).

🎴 Favicon + OpenGraph share card

Added a proper favicon (Goddard's space fedora silhouette) and a cinematic 1536×1024 social-share image of Goddard in front of an alien cityscape with twin moons. Pasted links to the site now unfurl properly on Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Slack, iMessage, and LinkedIn.

✏️ Copy-edit sweep

Mechanical normalization across all 164 passages: curly quotes standardized to straight, em-dash spacing made consistent, four-dot ellipses fixed, double-spaces collapsed, misspellings corrected ("alot", "could of", "definately", "seperate", "recieve"). The misspelled passage "5 Marshmellow" was renamed to "5 Marshmallow" everywhere (passage, image filename, all incoming links). Polish edits on the opening intro, final-choice math (was "four ways", should have been "six"), and several Ch 7-9 sentences.

🪦 Fixed a long-standing dead-end in 6 Finally

A pre-existing bug from the original story: the codebase used two different variable names ($TerraDitched read 13 times but never set, $DitchedTerra set 2 times and read 38 times) for the same Terra-ditched state. Every (if: $TerraDitched is true) check silently failed, which meant one chapter-six passage rendered its opening text and then went dead — no continuation links. Renamed all 14 occurrences. Dead-end is gone.

🗣️ Character-voice color pass (full)

Across two passes, 327 dialogue lines are now color-coded by speaker: every named character now has their own tint, so dialogue color cues you in to who's speaking at a glance — Brindles' rusty brown, BoB's cyan, Karl's green-visor green, and so on through the cast.

🎨 Sharper, less-pixelated art style + Terra fix

The Countess was being drawn off-model. Regenerated 15 images with the canonical character look (matching the existing portrait reference) and switched the going-forward art direction to a sharper painted-illustration style — cinematic, cel-shaded, modern indie-game look.

🖼️ 126 new pixel-art illustrations

Chapters 3 through 9 had basically no images. Now every passage that lacked one has a custom widescreen 16:9 illustration, generated and inserted automatically via OpenAI gpt-image-1 with hand-tuned scene prompts for the iconic moments (QuestGiver Tree, Madame Phlegmwart's alchemy lab, the Gala punch-bowl disaster, the upside-down planet vomit gag, the inverted Pyramid of Nah, every ending). 163 of 164 passages now have art.

🎬 Chapter 7, 8, 9 — the finale arc

Chapter 7 was three "More to come..." stub passages. Now Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are full chapters — a mid-game investigation, an escalation, and a climactic finale with six distinct branching endings.

Also a length-balancing pass on Ch 1-6: fleshed out 14 too-short passages, trimmed the worst length outliers, fixed a handful of code quirks ($DitchedTerra boolean comparison, stray brackets in 1 Bribe and 1 RatedR/PG, the cracklesA typo).

✨ Harlowe animation pass

Strategic (text-style:) and (text-colour:) effects at high-impact narrative beats: shudder on key reveals, fade-in-out on otherworldly whispers, rumble on action moments, color-coded ending titles, mirror-text effects on certain endings, flickering neon on the most appropriately seedy diner signage.

📝 Early text polish

Various passage edits across Chapters 1-2 to tighten voice and gags.

🎵 Audio + Chapter 1 art

Two original theme tracks composed and integrated via the harlowe-audio plugin. Chapter 1 illustrations (Karl, Brindles, BoB, the shipyard, Terra cover) generated and placed. Various early-game text tweaks and ending tweaks.

🚀 Initial launch

The first version of Goddard Withings shipped on Twine 2 / Harlowe 3 with Chapters 1-6 written and a "more to come" hook for the finale.