Moonpetals
Moonpetals is an interactive horror mystery told through an unusual medium: the archive of an abandoned 2007 goth teenage web forum, which the reader excavates thread by thread to uncover a disappearance. Hadrian Ra designed the story, characters and format, and built an A.I. writing pipeline to draft its dialogue to his specifications. Narrative design, environmental storytelling and an experiment in writing with A.I.
Role: Creator: narrative designer and writer
Skills shown: narrative design, environmental storytelling, interactive fiction, world building
About
Moonpetals is a two-fold project: firstly, it's a retro horror detective investigation with a dreadful twist conducted in an unusual medium: it's not quite a book, it's not quite a game, it's an early phpBB forum (or so it seems to the reader) where the archive of a girly goth ~2007 community hides a horrifying mystery of the disappearance of midnite_sky, one of the girls from the forum. Secondly, though, it is a multi-month effort to construct a pipeline allowing A.I. to write believably natural dialogue when given specifics about the storyline. I'm gonna be honest: the success is moderate. All the obvious tells of A.I.-writing were eliminated, but anyone who has soaked up the language patterns of A.I., or anyone who has read a significant amount of books really, will find it slightly 'off'. I'm pretty confident that creating a workflow that allows you to write genuinely believable, authentically-sounding dialogue with A.I. is achievable, but it would require substantially more time to accomplish, to actually make characters have their own distinct though natural flavor, and a significant amount of work from the writer would still be required. Given, however, how I don't believe in A.I. replacing human creativity but merely extending it, I think this project could be considered a mild success in that regard.
