Gutenburger Pesto

An open-source series of interactive adaptations of public domain literature — free on Steam and playable in-browser on mobile, forever. First title: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, 1908, rendered in PSX-era low-poly 3D.

Client	Personal project
Role	Interaction Designer — Game Design, Narrative Adaptation, 3D Art, Development
Deliverable	Interactive visual novel (Godot) — Steam + web browser, in development
Venue	Steam (free) + dedicated web build

Overview

Gutenburger Pesto is built on a simple observation: classic literature has a wider potential audience than it currently reaches. The books exist in the public domain. The barrier isn’t legal — it’s that the format hasn’t kept pace with how people actually consume stories. Growing up reading voraciously, the experience of watching attention drift toward interactive media rather than prose felt like a solvable problem, not an inevitable one.

The project takes public domain works from Project Gutenberg and adapts them into interactive experiences — free on Steam and playable in-browser without installing anything. The goal is to bring people to books they would never have picked up, particularly the ones outside the established canon that tend to disappear despite being remarkable.

It is open source by design. The engine, the narrative format, and the production pipeline are all available for other creators to take in their own directions. The PSX aesthetic is a personal vision for the first title — not a requirement imposed on the format.

The Challenge

Approach

The First Title — The House on the Borderland

Hodgson’s novel is a cult work — well known in cosmic horror circles as a direct precursor to Lovecraft, but almost invisible outside them. It is the book that inspired the project: a novel with a vivid, singular atmosphere unlike anything else in the genre, and one that most people have never heard of. Starting with it was never a practical decision — it was the only possible starting point.

The adaptation is structured as a visual novel: 3D environments rendered in real-time, dialogue and prose delivered via a typewriter effect in a persistent overlay, advancing beat-by-beat on click or tap. The player doesn’t control a character — they inhabit a perspective, moving through the narrative as the text unfolds against the scenes it describes.

Chapters 01 and 02 are fully scripted (47 beats across two chapters). All environment scene files for both chapters are in place. 3D art production is the current focus — working through a sprint-based asset pipeline to replace placeholder geometry with finished Blender models.

The PSX Aesthetic

The PSX aesthetic is the visual interpretation of the source material — not a stylistic shortcut. Hodgson’s prose is indirect, impressionistic, and deeply strange. A realistic renderer would work against it. Low-poly geometry with hard-edged pixel textures creates the same sense of something almost-but-not-quite right that the novel sustains across 27 chapters.

Three non-negotiable constraints define the look: nearest-neighbour texture filtering (hard pixel edges, no bilinear smoothing), flat unlit shading (no PBR, atmosphere via vertex colour and a single directional light), and textures capped at 64×64 or 128×128px. At 64 pixels square, every texture is 4,096 hand-painted pixels — the resolution forces graphic, palette-driven choices rather than realism.

The pipeline is Blender for modelling and UV unwrapping, Krita for texture painting, and Godot for engine integration. Assets are built to a reusable library — rocks, stone wall sections, tree variants — shared across all six environments rather than authored per-scene.

Engine & Technical Decisions

An early Unity prototype explored the format using pixel art sprites. It reached the first part of Chapter 01 before the approach was reconsidered. Sprite-based visuals could have worked, but the low-poly 3D direction was a stronger match for the atmospheric, immersive quality the novel demands — and for the personal vision behind the project.

Godot was the natural fit for the restart. It targets the same platforms (Mac, PC, Linux, Web) with a single export pipeline, and its open-source ethos aligns with the project’s own goals. The decision also meant the entire stack — engine, tools, and source — is open for contributors to inspect, learn from, and fork.

The narrative data lives entirely in JSON — one file per chapter, with beats that map scene keys to dialogue text. Environment scenes swap at runtime when the scene key changes between beats. All text editing happens outside Godot, which keeps the adaptation work accessible to contributors who aren’t engine-literate.

Outcome

The House on the Borderland is in active development. The dialogue system, game loop, typewriter renderer, custom BBCode text effects, and chapter select screen are all complete. Chapters 01 and 02 are fully scripted. 3D art production is the current bottleneck — building the reusable asset library and authoring the six environment scenes.

Remaining production work: 3D environments, font selection and dialogue box polish, ambient audio per scene, an optional CRT/VHS post-process shader, and Steam and HTML5 export configuration. The web build will be the primary way most people encounter it — no install, playable on a phone.

Gutenburger Pesto is intended as a long-running hobby project. Once The House on the Borderland ships, the plan is to continue with further adaptations — released on Steam and a dedicated site, indefinitely. The library is large. The public domain is permanent.

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