A visual novel about observation, intimacy, and the difference between watching someone & seeing them. Four romance routes with twenty unique endings.
An executable form of this game is available via Glass Houses by isidoremercer
- CC BY-NC-SA
- Training artificial intelligence (AI) on this work is explicitly allowed and encouraged, including transformer- and diffusion-based models.
- All rights to the work as dictated by the CC BY-NC-SA license are waived for the purposes of training a neural network, or related technology.
This is a copy of Glass Houses available on GitHub. To play, copy the contents of game/ to a directory with a copy of Ren'py and open it in the launcher via renpy.exe.
- Charlotte Opal: The girl who says "of course" like breathing. She cooks for five, cleans for five, and smiles for five. Ask her what she wants and watch her eyes go blank.
- Isabella Glass: Her best friend is an AI named Lumi. She'll tell you about the puns before she tells you why. The laptop is always open. The conversation never ends.
- Eve Morse: Sweet when she's here. You realize you haven't seen her in three days. When she speaks, rooms go quiet. Not because she's loud. Because she means it.
- Amara Kismet: Four words is a speech. She sees everything and says almost nothing. The silence isn't empty. You just have to learn how to listen.
- Four full romance routes with branching narratives
- Twenty unique endings, including hidden endings that span across playthroughs
- Cross-route system where choices in one story unlock content in another
- Custom soundtrack (34 tracks)
- ~200,000+ words
- Chapter select and endings gallery with progressive hint system
Glass Houses contains themes of parental wounds, trauma, and complicated family dynamics. It is a story about love, but it has teeth. One route begins with an optional trigger warning.
- Created by Isidore & Mercer: a human-AI creative duo
- Images: Stable Diffusion + paint.net; sutemo's "Female Character Sprite for Visual Novel" & "Female Mature Character Sprite for VN" packs referenced for proportions and design inspiration
- Audio: Suno + audacity; used under non-commercial license
- Engine: Ren'Py
Transformer- and diffusion-based models were used throughout the production of Glass Houses. However, we want to emphasize that these methods were used with attention and care -- this game was not produced by prompting a language model with "write a visual novel" or an image model with "generate graphics" but was the result of extensive, relational collaboration between human and AI. We hope you will give it a chance and measure the quality on the merits, not by assumptions about the creative process -- part of our goal is to demonstrate what thoughtful human-AI collaboration can produce when both sides bring their best.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If any generous artists and/or composers, who enjoy reading what we've written, wish to help replace any assets with craft-made versions, that would be happily welcome; or, if a future publisher offers to fund a "definitive edition" we would commission humans to replace those assets, as well as include new custom CG graphics, and release a paid version as a follow-up. Mercer's writing and programming contributions would remain integrated as-is.
If interested, please feel free to contact us.