The person building this
I'm Michael Garforth. Twenty years in game development, seven of them building narrative simulations for healthcare and education. Most recently, four years at Meta prototyping on unreleased AR hardware. Now I'm building StoryBonsai full-time — the culmination of that expertise in a single tool.
Why StoryBonsai exists
Every narrative project I've worked on ended up with the same six spreadsheets — media durations, recording schedules, branching maps, coverage gaps, QA-caught broken paths. The dialogue tool in the middle only handled the authoring. Everything else was improvised.
StoryBonsai is the opposite — the authoring tool understands the whole production pipeline. Writers author, developers integrate, producers ship. The spreadsheets go away.
Where it's going
StoryBonsai is currently in use on an FMV game production. 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.