Games treat dialogue as a scripting problem. Film and TV treat narrative as a production problem, with scripts, cast, recording sessions, reviews, and certification. StoryBonsai is built for the second model.

Media duration tracking

Automatic duration calculation from linked media assets. Know your recording schedule before you book a studio. Know your run-time before you sign a contract.

Test suite for narrative

Expression tests pin condition behaviour. Define cases (these variables, this play history, this inventory, this location, this time of day) and lock in the expected outcome. Catches "fixed once, broken later" regressions before they ship.

Assertion tests capture invariants the whole game has to satisfy. "The player never enters the boss room without a weapon." "The bartender eventually offers a drink once met." "Logic skill stays within bounds." Each assertion has a wrapper (always, eventually, never, until) and one or more lines composed with and / or / implies. Temporal logic, in a clear UI.

Run all in seconds. Failing tests highlight inline on the entity that owns them. Tests live with the field they describe, so renaming the field doesn't break the test.

Automated path testing

Play thousands of versions of your story. Five strategies drive the tester at different goals:

Random. Uniform exploration.
Adversarial. Finds lockouts and dead ends.
Cooperative. Verifies happy paths.
Greedy goal-seeking. Heuristic toward a target state.
Coverage-guided. Pushes into under-explored regions.

The tester drives MoveTo and AdvanceTime alongside choices, so it explores the whole world rather than just the dialogue tree.

Coverage heatmaps show where the narrative is under-tested. The tester catches what a static scan cannot: unreachable nodes, variable-bounds violations, duration mismatches, infinite loops.

One rich report per run

Every path-test run produces a single report covering everything observed across the playthroughs. It includes issues with traces, a coverage heatmap, a per-check skill-check breakdown (hit rate, pass rate, average DC margin), a dead-end analysis with diagnosis hypotheses, per-variable extremes seen, and inventory peak. Exports as markdown for human reviewers or structured JSON for dashboards and build archives. Hand it to your publisher, archive it with the build, review it over coffee.

Project Validator

Every broken reference, unreachable branch, out-of-bounds variable, and expression that returns the wrong type for its target variable surfaces in one panel. Production catches issues before QA does.

Story beats for recap and analytics

Writers tag narrative moments in video and audio. The engine remembers which beats a player has seen and at what importance. Build "previously on…" recaps, character-aware ambience, or narrative analytics from data already in your story.

Git-native collaboration

One file per node, per scene, per location, per item, per skill. Small, focused diffs. Zero merge conflicts between writers editing different entities. Your team's git workflow stays as it is.

Platform and engine coverage

Unity, Godot, MonoGame via .NET Standard 2.1. Tested on PC, Mac, and Steam Deck today; mobile and console coming.

Single-player or multiplayer. Built into the runtime.

Ship multiplayer narrative without re-architecting. Split-screen or online, with state tracked per player.

Coming soon

In active development.

Embeddable web preview Share any conversation with anyone: producers, voice directors, stakeholders, QA. A shareable URL, no install required. Click-through review for teams that can't run the editor.
Voice production pipeline CSV and markdown script export, recording session handoff, duration-source tracking on every line.
Content sensitivity tagging Map content warnings to nodes. Generate a summary for ratings-body submissions (ESRB, PEGI, BBFC).

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