Hi all. I’ve been working on this on my own for a while and it’s finally at a point where I can show it.
Game part visual-novel, part customer service sim.
In Empty Inbox you work customer support at a company called Evership. You open a case, read the complaint and type the reply yourself, no dialogue options. The twist is that every morning your coworkers pick a word and you have to land it in every reply of the shift, while your quality supervisor Mai scores everything you send on opening, diagnosis, solution, closing and spelling. She doesn’t know the game exists, so putting the word somewhere it fits reads as good writing, and forcing it just reads as bad writing.
Some Godot-side notes, in case they’re useful to anyone:
- Godot 4.6, GL Compatibility, all 2D. Ten days of cases, around 60 hand-written support tickets.
- The scoring runs on a small language model on the player’s machine, through the NobodyWho GDExtension. No connection, no servers, and nothing in the game is generated by it: the art, the characters and every line of dialogue are written and drawn by hand. The model only reads what the player types and answers a series of yes/no questions that the code turns into a score.
- Getting that to survive an export was the fun part. The model can’t be read from inside the .pck, so it ships as a loose file next to the executable, and there’s a timeout so a model that fails to load can never hang the run.
- macOS builds are made and signed on a CI runner, since the app carries dynamic libraries and that can’t be signed from Windows.
It’s in development for PC and Mac, no date yet. Page here: (tu enlace de itch)
Happy to answer anything about the setup.