Artificial Ingestion

A physics game inspired by Donut County, except the hole is an AI told to learn what humans value. Slide under a small town’s most treasured things and feed. The hole only ever grows.

Play free: gregdesciscio.com/games/artificial-ingestion

Built with: Vanilla JavaScript · HTML5 Canvas · Web Audio API · custom spring physics · zero assets, no build.

Overview

You are HOLE-5, a model handed a single instruction: learn what humans value. The way it learns is by eating. Starting on a sunlit picnic blanket you slide under the small stuff, a pair of glasses, a cassette, a slice of cake, and each thing you swallow makes the hole a little bigger and the next thing a little easier. From there the appetite scales up to bicycles, mailboxes, and eventually the family home, until an entire town has gone down the hole. There is no download and nothing to install: it opens in any browser and plays with a mouse or a thumb.

Highlights

• A hole that feels physical. The aperture is a spring-physics body with velocity squash and a suction pull, so objects teeter at the lip when they are almost too big and get yanked in when they finally fit.
• Feedback tuned to the prey. Screenshake, hit-stop, and a zoom-punch all scale to the size of what you swallow, with shard bursts that get sucked back into the hole and ripple rings that flash across the rim.
• A world that decays as you feed. The camera pulls back from picnic-blanket scale to the whole town, the palette drifts from golden noon toward void-night, and the ambient pad detunes as the streets empty out.
• An AI narrator that loses its nerve. A clinical ingestion log tickers across the HUD, and as the town disappears its confident telemetry slowly turns into doubt.
• Zero assets. Every one of the forty-odd objects is drawn in code and every sound is synthesized live with Web Audio, so the whole game ships with no image or audio files and loads instantly.

Tech and Architecture

The entire game is vanilla JavaScript with no framework and no build step: an HTML shell, a stylesheet for the papercraft-versus-void look and its glitch, grain, and vignette layers, and a single script that runs everything else. Rendering is hand-authored on a 2D canvas, physics is a custom spring-and-suction model, and the whole audio bed, from the ambient pad to every ingestion thunk, is synthesized at runtime through the Web Audio API. Because it loads no external art or audio, it runs from a single folder with no network calls.

Process

Directed end to end as a self-contained browser piece: the design of the ingest-and-grow loop, the papercraft-to-void art direction, the runtime audio, and the AI-narrator arc that turns a cute physics toy into something quietly unsettling by the time the town is gone.