The level design of an interactive novel

I’ve spent a decade routing players through spaces: heists, open-world regions, extraction maps. This year I started routing readers through a novel, and the surprise wasn’t how different it is. It’s how little I had to relearn.

Perpetūra’s core mechanic is a silent accumulator. Choices lean the story toward one route or another, and the reader never sees a number. That’s soft gating, the same tool as an open-world region that steers you with light, landmarks and road curvature instead of walls. The moment you show the meter, players optimize the meter. Hide it, and they navigate by feel — which is the only honest way to navigate a romance.

The parallels kept stacking up:

A story’s route lock is a point of no return, and it obeys the same rule as one in a level: telegraph it, let the player feel the door close, never spring it silently. Perpetūra locks routes late and makes the locking chapter feel like a threshold, for the same reason a heist marks the moment stealth ends.

The codex is environmental storytelling. Optional, missable, rewarding the reader who pokes at corners — the same job as a note on a desk in a level nobody has to enter. And the codex’s spoiler tiers are streaming rules: content loads only when the player has earned the context for it.

The flowchart a reader unlocks after finishing a story is a level flow diagram, drawn for the player instead of the team. Watching testers trace their path through it is exactly like watching a playtest heatmap: everyone believes their route was the main one. That belief is the design goal.

Even the production discipline transferred. A story outline is a blockout — cheap, structural, meant to be torn up. Prose is set dressing, and dressing a broken blockout wastes everyone’s time; that’s why every Perpetūra story gets its structure audited before it gets its sentences polished. The route template’s split between invariants and variation axes is just the difference between a level’s critical path and its optional loops.

Both manifestos on this site say balance: logic and fun, useful and felt. One craft, two materials. Spaces made of geometry, spaces made of sentences, and the same job in both — make the path the player chose feel like the only one that was ever there.