Hey everyone.
I'm starting this devlog mostly because we've been heads-down on a project for about six weeks now and I've been wanting to talk about it with people who aren't just my teammates. So here we are.
We're a small team based in Antalya, working on a desktop app called ChoiceStory Studio. The short version: you drag your own videos and images onto a canvas, connect them with lines, and the app turns the whole thing into a branching, choice-driven story. When you're done you export it as a single installer file. No code, no game engine, no online accounts. It runs offline, end to end.
Here's what putting a tiny scene together actually looks like — one image, one video, a line between them, and the choice screen comes out of that automatically:
Right now we're focused on video because that's where the hard part lives. When the player makes a choice and the next clip starts, the cut has to feel invisible. No black frame, no audio gap, no "loading." If that's not smooth, the whole illusion falls apart and we might as well not exist. So we're spending a lot of our time on that one problem before pushing for breadth.
The canvas itself isn't going to stay video-only though. Visual novels, text-driven branching games, training simulations, kiosk experiences — anything where "what happens next" depends on the audience — we want to support all of it eventually, all from the same tool. But one thing at a time. We'd rather get the hard part right first than do five mediums badly.
Now the honest part, and the actual reason I'm writing this post:
We're heading into an early access release pretty soon. And I'm starting this devlog before launch on purpose,because I genuinely don't want to ship something, lock it in, and then call it done. I have my own ideas about what this tool should become, but they're just my ideas. If the people who actually try to use it tell us "we really need X," or "this thing you're spending weeks on doesn't matter to us," that's what should drive the next version. Not my taste, not my hunches. The people building stories with it.
So if any of this sounds even mildly interesting, and you have things you'd want from a tool like this — a feature, a workflow, a use case I haven't thought of — please come tell us. Reply here, find us on X as @ChoiceStoryDev, email, whatever's easiest. I read everything. Even the harsh stuff. Especially the harsh stuff.
I'll keep posting here as things move. What we built that week. What we threw away (already done that once — burned seven iterations on a custom file protocol before scrapping it for a boring local HTTP server, that's a write-up for another day). Where we're stuck and could use outside eyes.
That's about it for the introduction. Thanks for being here this early. More soon.
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