What is StoryBonsai?
StoryBonsai is a tools company building middleware for narrative game studios. The bet: narrative production should be one workflow, not three siloed disciplines reconciling through documents.
Currently in use on a working FMV game production. Indie studios are the initial collaboration focus.
Who built StoryBonsai?
I'm Michael Garforth. Building games since 2006, with seven years on narrative simulations for healthcare and education. I built the dialogue tool that drove those products and trained the writers who used it. Most recently I spent four years at Meta prototyping on unreleased AR hardware. Now building StoryBonsai full-time.
Where it's going
Next: web-based stakeholder review, a complete voice production pipeline, and localization. The longer-term goal is a narrative production platform that scales from one-writer indie projects to multi-studio productions without changing tools.
Explore by role
- For writers — author branching conversations on a visual node graph.
- For developers — a .NET Standard 2.1 runtime with a pull-based API.
- For producers — built-in test suite, path tester, and pipeline reports.