Hidden Door

In story mode, you play in the first-person perspective of your character. The system sets up challenges and tension for you to navigate. There is a very light stats system behind the scenes, and you do roll dice for particularly challenging actions. There are stakes, and constraints. Back at the table, you see your world represented as a deck of cards. This is where you get to add new cards to your deck, and choose which character, things, and places you want to play with next. Our Narrator, Twist, is the one constant. They are your friend, and your guide, and offer you story possibilities and share in your joys and critical failures. You can’t win, but you can succeed. This is a game you play to explore the untold stories of a world, and your choices do change the world. You can also play to unlock every canon character and get every special plot and modifier.

Sorta, it’s all Artisanal Brooklyn ML made with love and care.

It’s a fractal combinatorial trope engine. Our narrative team of real humans write flexible, structured plot beats, and we then use a variety of ML tools to combine those beats with the rules of the world, the player’s choices, the characters in a given scenario, generic plot beats, and our trope soup into a delicious story meal. We update our game engine layer with a structured representation of everything in your world, from story events to character stats and conditions. This, along with the narrative beats and the tropes and rules of a specific world, is what we use to make the actual text and assemble the bits of art that you see. In each turn of the game we run a bunch of different tasks, some of them purely programmatic, some using what’s now called 'classic' machine learning, a few using LLMs. We have a game engine layer that stores each character, item, or location in the world, and its state. We use that engine to generate the story that you see as you play.

Fuck no. We read the books or watch the movies and then write an opinionated take on the world as editorial guidance for our system.