Mark Maidanov

Books became digital. Music became interactive. Games became massive social worlds.

But storytelling still seems divided into two extremes: traditional books, where the reader observes the story, and games, where interaction often comes with the complexity of building an entire game.

We think there s a huge space between them.

Stories where readers make meaningful choices, explore different paths and endings, build relationships with characters, interact with RPG mechanics, and experience illustrations, music, and sound while the story itself remains at the center.

We ve been thinking a lot about what actually makes a creative tool worth learning.

With Forgeon, we re building an editor where writers can create branching stories visually - connecting scenes, adding choices, multiple paths and endings, RPG mechanics, relationships, music, illustrations, and other interactive elements.

But adding more features doesn t necessarily make a better creative tool.

For us, the goal is to make something powerful enough for complex interactive worlds, while still being approachable for someone who just wants to tell a great story.

Interactive stories have existed for years - but creating them still feels unnecessarily complicated.

Writers often need one tool to write, another to manage branching paths, another to publish, and somewhere else entirely to find readers and monetize their work.

As readers, we also felt that interactive stories were scattered across different apps, games, websites, and communities.

That s one of the reasons we started building Forgeon.