About — StoryboundAI

Overview

What is StoryboundAI?

StoryboundAI is a browser-based interactive fiction game powered by AI. You create a character, drop into a living world, and take actions that drive a branching story. Storybound is much more than just a single AI chatbot. In the background, there are various AI Agents actively tracking the state of your world, your character, the people around you, and your ongoing objectives, updating each one after every turn.

There's no backend server. Every AI request goes directly from your browser to whichever API provider you configure. Your API key and story data never leave your device. There are no StoryboundAI servers; Your data is not retained by us (your API provider likely does retain your data though).

🧬

Step 1

Create

AI generates your character's traits, abilities, and inventory

🌍

Step 2

Enter

AI builds your starting environment and populates it with NPCs

⚔️

Step 3

Act

Choose or write your action; the AI narrates what happens

🔄

Step 4

Evolve

World state, character traits, inventory, and objectives update

Under the Hood

The AI agent pipeline

Every meaningful game event is handled by a dedicated AI call with strict structured responses. Rather than one monolithic prompt, the game is split into a pipeline of specialized agents, each responsible for one piece of the world. This keeps outputs structured, predictable, and independently updatable. This design also allows the primary story driver agent to track only the relevant story context, leaving the secondary analysis agents to handle the rest.

Agent

What it does

Phase

minichar_gen

Character Generation

Generates 10 mini-characters — name, gender, age, and role/job title. Used for mix-and-match character building before committing to a full character.

Character

basic_info_gen

Character Generation

Fleshes out core identity: full name, nickname, age, height, gender, and a short description. First of three sequential character generation calls. This will probably be consolidated with the minichar_gen function soon.

Character

traits_gen

Character Generation

Generates abilities, limitations, flaws, agility, and starting location. Abilities can include magical or unusual skills; limitations provide narrative balance.

Character

inventory_gen

Content Generation

Creates a context-appropriate starting inventory of 0–5 items, each with name, description, quantity, and weight. Items fit the character's background and location.

Character

environment_gen

Content Generation

Builds the full starting environment: location, time of day, temperature, vibe, sounds, an arrival backstory, and up to 5 NPCs — each with a rich opinion profile.

Environment

action_suggester

Content Generation

Generates 4 contextual actions for the player each turn, scaled from low-risk to risky. This function is fed character abilities, flaws, inventory, environment, and active objectives (user-facing objective data only). These actions make it easy to use Storybound without typing very much.

Action

story_narrator

Content Generation

The main narrative engine — writes what happens when you take an action. Aware of full world state: character stats, environment, NPCs, history, objectives (including secret objective info), and maturity settings.

Action

state_change_detector

Internal Brain

After each narration, identifies what changed: did the environment shift? Did the character evolve? Does inventory need updating? Is a trade occuring? Triggers the appropriate downstream agents. This is primarily a change detection agent. It does NOT generate new story content; It flags story information as needing to be updated.

Action

world_state_patcher

Internal Brain

Receives a list of required environment updates from state_change_detector (above). Applies targeted updates to environment fields and character traits. NPC opinion profiles are updated here too.

Environment

inventory_updater

Content Generation

Recomputes the player's full inventory after items are gained, used, or lost during an action. Runs conditionally, only when state_change_detector flags an inventory change.

Action

story_log_consolidator

Helper - Story Log

Summarizes the story so far into a rolling log, preventing context loss over long sessions. Helps anchor the AI to important past events even as history is pruned.

Action

objective_planner

Content Generation

When a new objective is accepted, writes a step-by-step plan: user-visible steps with hidden AI context to guide NPC behavior toward objective completion.

Objectives

objective_progress

Internal Brain

Tracks which objective steps were completed or passed after each action, and marks objectives as finished when all required steps are done.

Objectives

npc_inventory_gen

Content Generation

Lazily generates an NPC's inventory on demand — only when the player chooses to inspect it. Context-aware based on who the NPC is and what's happening.

Environment

scene_focus_gen

Helper - Image Gen

Proposes 5 visual focus options for scene illustration — specific framing choices based on what's happening in the current moment.

Scene

scene_visual_gen

Content Generation

Builds a detailed image generation prompt from the chosen focus and full scene context, then calls the image model to produce a visual.

Scene

World Simulation

NPC opinion profiles

Every character in your world has a five-dimensional opinion profile, maintained and updated by the AI after every interaction. These aren't cosmetic — they influence how NPCs behave, what actions they offer, and how the narrator portrays their reactions.

Opinion profile schema — per NPC, range −0.99 to +0.99

overall

General disposition toward the player. Negative = hostile, positive = friendly.

familiarity

How well they know the player. Starts low for strangers, grows through interaction.

trust

Confidence in the player's intentions. Can drop sharply from betrayal or deception.

loyalty

Commitment to the player's cause. High loyalty means the NPC will act on your behalf.

touch_comfort

Physical boundary comfort. Negative = discomfort with contact, positive = comfortable with closeness.

Example — Tavern keeper, mid-game

overall

+0.35

familiarity

+0.55

trust

+0.20

loyalty

+0.08

touch_comfort

−0.15

Living Characters

Characters that change

Your character isn't static. The AI can propose changes to your abilities, limitations, and flaws as the story develops, gaining a skill through training, losing a limitation after growth, or picking up a flaw from a traumatic event.

Every AI-proposed change can be undone with a single button press. Nothing is permanent unless you allow it to be, since the AI is annoying sometimes and proposes illogical changes.

⚡

Ability evolution

Abilities can be added, modified, or removed based on story events. Each change is tracked and reversible.

🎯

Active objectives

Objectives have hidden AI context — guiding NPC behavior toward helping or hindering you without breaking immersion.

🗂️

Persistent inventory

Every item gained or consumed is tracked. The AI updates your inventory after every relevant action.

📜

Story log

A rolling summary prevents memory loss over long sessions, keeping the AI anchored to what matters.

Data Portability

Import / Export

Your characters, story history, and settings can be exported as a single JSON file and re-imported at any time — across browsers or devices. The API key is intentionally excluded from exports.

Export format

_integrity

A SHA-256 hash of the entire payload, computed at export time. On import, the hash is recomputed and compared — a mismatch surfaces a warning but does not block the import. I added this so anyone who "cheats" is acknowledged. Any file with broken integrity is "flagged", but that doesn't really do anything and can probably be easily faked.

storybound_settings

API provider URL, model names, mature content setting. API key is stripped before export.

storybound_characters

Full array of saved characters, each with their environment, NPCs, action history, objectives, and last-played timestamp.

🔐

Hash verification

The SHA-256 integrity check detects whether a backup file was manually edited after export. It's a tamper warning, not a restriction — modified files still import successfully with a notice. To the cheaters: I see you...

Privacy & Setup

Your API key, your data

StoryboundAI has no backend. Every API request goes directly from your browser to your chosen AI provider. Your API key is stored only in your browser's local storage and is never included in data exports.

🔒

Client-side only

No account, no server, no tracking beyond Cloudflare Analytics. Game state, characters, and story history live entirely in your browser's localStorage. Use the built-in export tool to back them up.

Supported providers

xAI (Grok) OpenAI Anthropic Groq OpenRouter Custom endpoint