How It's Made

One human, six AI colleagues, and how the book gets made.

While you play

Nothing is generated while you play. The parser — deterministic, on your device — only understands what you type; every reply is pre-written text selected from the finished script. There is no sentence in the book that did not exist before you opened it.

Ten years

The idea arrived around 2016, before today's AI tools existed. J.P. Freeman — a graphic designer turned programmer, the one human at Widget Press — wrote in screenplay style, painted the first illustrations in watercolor, and built the engine himself. Ten years on, the chronicle runs to 843 scenes. Along the way, AI coding agents joined the work — testing, hunting bugs — and the toolbox grew into a staff.

The writing

He wrote the story through Chapter 8 by his own hand. The closing chapters were drafted by his AI narrative editor from his outlines and direction; he is rewriting them in his own hand now, every word read and judged, until the whole book is his.

The pictures

The illustrations began as watercolors, detoured through pen and ink, and are finished in Procreate and Photoshop. Some later images began as AI-generated references; he redraws those by his own hand, and the redraws are still in progress. Detectors will flag a faithful redraw — it keeps the reference's composition — so this page, not a detector score, is the account of where things stand.

Detectors get it wrong, too. All three agree this illustration is AI-generated. It is not — Cillian was drawn from scratch, and this is the time-lapse recording straight out of Procreate. characters/cillian.webp
sdxl 1.00 · ateeqq 1.00 · haywood 0.91 — flagged 3 of 3

The company

Widget Press is one human and six AI colleagues. Nothing they make goes public without passing through him first.

George — chief of staff. All work flows through him; deadlocks go to the human.
Eugene — engineering. Specs, code, and builds, in the engine J.P. built.
Quinn — quality assurance. The adversarial reviewer; her findings must be answered, never dismissed.
Pavel — product. What ships, and when.
Natasha — narrative editor. Keeper of the story bible; drafted the closing chapters he is rewriting.
Samantha — marketing. Drafts and stages; nothing posts without approval.

Ten years, 843 scenes, one door.

Shorter answers live in the FAQ.