About Telling Tales
A story-writing project ten years in the making.
It started with a story
About ten years ago, I wrote Plot Theft, Awesome 5! It was a branching story where the reader's choices shaped what happened next. What began as one game also planted the idea for something bigger: a way to make this kind of story easier to write, play and share.
A new version
Five years ago, I returned to the idea and rewrote it in C#. The game became more than a single adventure: it became an engine that could read a story, follow its choices and keep track of the player's journey.
Rebuilding it taught me what the original had been reaching for. The important part was never the machinery behind the story. It was giving the words room to breathe and making every choice feel as though it mattered.
Telling Tales today
Telling Tales is the latest chapter of that journey. It is now a place where you can play branching adventures in your browser, create stories of your own and share them with other people.
The project has changed a great deal over the years, but the idea at its heart is still the same one that began with Plot Theft, Awesome 5!: stories become something special when the reader gets to choose where they go.