CREATIVE LAB / COMING SOON
Chicken Skin: a book that remembers what you did.
A planned series of interactive digital stories built around decisions, hidden state, consequence and a little science-fiction unease.
Some stories want to be read. Others want to ask you a question and remember your answer.
Chicken Skin is my developing digital-book series. The first planned interactive entry is The Anima Monolith, a near-future mystery set in 2042. It shares creative DNA with Island Quest, but it is being designed as its own lightweight experience—not an entire game engine squeezed into a book jacket.
Pages are data; decisions are logic
The technical idea is straightforward: the content lives in authored page records. Each page can contain prose, illustration, audio, state changes and choices. A choice points to another page, sometimes through a condition or chance check. The runtime executes the authored graph rather than baking the entire story into custom code.
PAGE 042
read a fragment
choose: follow the clue
if EVIDENCE >= 2 -> PAGE 051
otherwise -> PAGE 044
save: current page + story stateThis is an illustrative example of the planned architecture, not a leaked plot branch.
The tricky bit is the invisible bookkeeping
If a decision matters three chapters later, the system has to preserve it. That means stable page IDs, a small set of tracked variables, consistent save/load, and validation for broken links, unreachable scenes, impossible conditions and endings the reader can never reach.
The early project notes call for keyboard/controller navigation, optional illustrations, difficulty-adjusted checks and a debugging mode that can walk the whole story graph. These are requirements under development, not features I am announcing as shipped.
Why build this separately?
Island Quest already has useful patterns for menus, saving, presentation and atmosphere. The smart move is to borrow only the small parts that travel well. Reusing a huge open-world simulation stack to turn a page would be engineering comedy—funny, but expensive.
A small reusable storytelling runtime could support an entire series: mysteries, branching adventures, illustrated novellas and stories that begin and end very differently depending on the person reading.
Coming soon, on its own schedule
The series is in development. There is no public release date to promise yet. What I can share is the approach: preserve authored prose, give choices real consequences, and make a digital book feel like something that could only exist on a screen.
A page turn can be an interaction. A choice can be a memory. That is where the fun starts.
Personal commentary and work-in-progress thinking. Historical workplace material is used only as private research context; this page does not disclose private operational records. Descriptions of planned features are not claims of released software.