What If Classics — Interactive Fiction & Generative AI Pipelines
Solo builder (side project)
A "choose your story" library of public-domain classics — branching endings and MBTI character cards — and the text-and-image generation pipeline behind it.
A hobby build well outside my day job, and the most hands-on I’ve gone with generative pipelines.
What If Classics turns public-domain novels (The Wizard of Oz, I, Robot, The Great Gatsby) into short interactive stories: branch the plot at key moments, reach one of 16+ endings, and get an MBTI-style character card based on your choices.
The real lesson was orchestration — automating large language and image-generation models into a repeatable pipeline that drafts branching narratives, keeps them coherent, and produces matching artwork at scale. I documented the process in a “building in public” diary series on the site.
After going quiet for months, I picked it back up in mid-2026 when Anthropic opened a free access window for Claude’s Fable 5 model. Over a single weekend, the entire look and feel went from a plain blog template to something that actually plays like a game.
