From Screenplay To Screen Playable
My latest LLM experiment has been turning dormant screenplays and TTRPGs into OG text adventures you can play in your browser.
Screenplays roll on a one way railroad track. Readers board at FADE IN, ride all the way to FADE OUT, never getting the option to switch tracks. My RPG books run looser, a toy box of people and places waiting for a Game Master to deploy on the tabletop.
A text adventure is a story you click through instead of read straight. It hands you a scene, gives you a few options, and your choice decides what happens next.
If you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book as a kid, jamming two fingers between the pages so you could back out of the death you just walked into, you already know the shape of this.
No graphics, no joystick. Words on a screen and a handful of choices. Right in your browser. I’ve got four of them live now, in very different worlds.
Two sit in Terra Conflictus, my drowned and overheated future circa 2066 and beyond. In High Water you roam a flooded London and decide which of four factions inherits the wreckage. In Tag the Launch you run one illegal street race against a countdown.
The other two live in The Eternal Court, my gaslamp fantasy from an alternate 1793 where the living climb the mountains to petition a parliament of the dead.
In The Petition of Szurkevolgy (Narrative map in photo above) you carry that petition yourself, a half-frozen villager hauling a sealed letter up to a city of immortals.
In The Null Set you show up as the heroine of my TV Pilot, a steampunk accountant dropped into a perilous predicament.
Past the simple fact that making these is fun, they can be a solid structure test. You can’t fake a story branch. The second you ask what the player can actually do in a scene, every soft spot alights. A scene with no real choice in it. Characters who want nothing. The bit where the story is just rearranging furniture.
Making your heroes journey walkable can reveal exactly where it was never leading anywhere.
Your script has rooms and doors and people with agendas. A Text Adventure lets somebody else explore it. Kind of like you did when scribbling. Making keystroke discoveries about what price your characters pay when making dramatic narrative choices.
If you’re in the mood to build your own with a desktop LLM like Claude Code or Codex, here’s the prompt I used. You can run its output locally or host online easily with a service like Netlify.
