Chronicle: Iterative Fiction Engine

The longest session I have played was on a ship. I spent it going cabin to cabin looking for a key to open a box, and the game kept generating rooms, illustrating them, and reading them to me. I never found the key. I also have not finished a story end to end yet, because the mechanics are still the thing I am fixing.

Every turn in Chronicle is generated from scratch: a short scene, an illustration, and narration. You pick one of four choices or type your own. When you have had enough, you hit end and the engine gives you five final choices that lock in the outcome. Early versions fell apart fast. Without a strict memory structure, the art style drifted, the plot looped, and the prompt kept growing until the engine choked on it. I built a memory stack that compresses older events into shorthand while carrying forward the exact visual tags the image model needs. A turn used to take two minutes. Lighter models got it down to twenty seconds.

It runs with no backend and no build step, which is painful enough that I plan to tear the engine down and start over. The ship is still out there.