I tried writing an interactive novel and accidentally built a platform

A few months ago I tried to write an interactive fiction novel.

It turned into a software project.

As the story grew, managing the structure quickly became difficult: branches, conditions, narrative state… everything started getting messy.

At some point I opened Visual Studio to try to solve the problem for myself. The initial idea was simple: separate the prose from the runtime logic that drives the story.

That experiment slowly turned into a small ecosystem called iepub:

• a structured format for interactive books • a reader runtime that interprets that format • and a visual editor designed for writing interactive fiction

The editor tries to feel like a normal writing tool (something closer to Google Docs) but designed for branching narrative. It lets you define narrative conditions, attach variables to sections, configure probabilistic events (like dice rolls), create narrative variants, and visualize the structure of the story as a graph.

Most of the development ended up happening with AI agents (Codex) acting as development partners, which turned into a surprisingly effective workflow for iterating on architecture, UI components and debugging.

If anyone is curious:

Project: https://iepub.io

Article about the development process: https://medium.com/@santi.santamaria.medel/interactive-ficti...

Happy to answer questions about the project, the architecture, or the AI-assisted development workflow.