What is StoryBonsai?
StoryBonsai is a narrative engine and visual editor for Unity, Godot, and any .NET game, built by a tools company of the same name. The bet: narrative production should be one workflow covering authoring, testing, localization, and shipping, not siloed disciplines reconciling through documents.
What games use StoryBonsai?
StoryBonsai is in private beta and already in production at a studio on two titles: an FMV game and a historical CRPG set in 1930s New York. Indie studios are the initial focus.
Who built StoryBonsai?
I'm Michael Garforth. Building games since 2006, with seven years at Kognito, later part of Ascend Learning, building narrative simulations for healthcare and education, including conversation training for mental health and suicide prevention. 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 is StoryBonsai going?
The most recent major release was localization, which shipped in 2026. Next on the roadmap: web-based review, so a publisher or stakeholder can read a story in the browser, and a voice production pipeline that sends lines out for recording and brings the finished audio back into the project.
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.
- The manual: every feature, function, and event type, documented.