An interactive presentation of Jason Shiga’s choose-your-path comic book Meanwhile. I worked with the author to redesign his book as a playable app, and then implemented it for iOS (ObjC).

A few years later I ported the game logic to Unity (C#) for a Mac/PC release. The underlying data was the same, but I had to adapt the original touchscreen UI to both mouse and gamepad input. I wound up implementing a custom UI system for Unity, and also pulled in a vector rendering library for certain parts of the game display.

I have since used the same frameworks to release iOS/Mac/PC versions of two more of Jason’s books: Leviathan and The Beyond. (Samurai vs Ninja is scheduled for this fall.)

Wanderstop

Narrative tools consultation (2021)

Wanderstop is a 2025 game by Ivy Road. I was not involved with developing the game itself, but I helped build the narrative workflow that the developers used.

Wanderstop began with a narrative concept (see the web site) and several pages of sample dialogue from the lead writer. The developers came up with a scripting language and dialogue engine to handle this content, but they had some trouble closing the write-edit-test loop. I was brought in for a few months (mid-2021) to review the system and suggest improvements.

(I am credited as "Tools Programming Consultant", which is generous of them.)

Character Engine

Narrative content authoring tool (2017-2019)

I was one of two engineers building a next-generation dialogue system for videogame characters. The project was conceived by Emily Short for a company called SpiritAI. The intent was to combine flexible, topic-based dialogue mechanics with AI lexical analysis of the player's input. (2017-era AI, not current generative AI.)

Character Engine was originally written in C#. I was involved in porting it to C++ as a plugin for both Unity and Unreal.

We worked on Character Engine intensely for a couple of years, but sadly the project did not gel with how the company wanted to run it, and nothing ever shipped.