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Intro

Welcome to the official Story Builder documentation!​

Story Builder is an open-source platform for creating and playing choose-your-own-adventure games. It's made of two parts:

  • The Builder is a no-code visual editor where you can create your stories and export them
  • The Library is where you can import stories and play them, track your game analytics and save your progress

Core principles​

Open-source​

Story Builder is an open-source project, which means that the code is available to everyone. It's a way to give back to the community by making our code accessible and reusable (as long as it stays open) and also to benefit from it by receiving help on the project.

The source code is hosted on Codeberg

Free​

The project is free and will stay free forever. It won't include ads either.

Local-first​

Story Builder is designed to be local-first. This means that by default data is only stored locally. We don't store anything on our servers, apart from user information (username, email and password) unless you manually save it.

We do this for 3 reasons:

  • Cloud native shouldn't be the default. We feel like most web applications make an excessive number of network requests. We believe that applications can offer great user experience without being connected all the time. By quitting spamming the network every time you click on a button, we save bandwidth and give you back control over the application.
  • Control over your data. Your data stays on your device until you decide otherwise.
  • Offline mode. This allows the application to function without the need of an internet connection.

How do we store your data?​

Basically, every action performed on the application is automatically saved in a local database. This database is tied to a specific browser, meaning that on the same computer, each browser (firefox, chrome, safari...) is treated like a different device.

On the other end, when you save data on the cloud, we use a traditional cloud-based database.

Caveats​

Being local-first means that your progress, your on-going games and the stories you create are only saved on your device until you specifically save your data on the cloud. This loses some of the comfort we are used to on most web-based applications, but we believe that in order to keep away from the fast-paced technological capitalism and consumerism, we sometimes need to make a little extra effort.

About AI​

We believe the societal evolutions that AI (LLMs) is causing are harmful. The ecological and environmental impact of AI increases every day. AI supply chains exacerbate the issues already risen by the cloud and tech industry: human exploitation, destructive mining extraction, reproduction of discriminatory biases, concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals and the search for infinite growth. We also believe that AI is making us lose of one of the most critical human ability: the capacity to think by ourselves, to synthesize information.

Therefore, Story Builder does not include AI features. While some devs that have worked on Story Builder have used AI to do so, it is not in our practices to use it. I think I can safely say that 99% of the code is human-generated.