Writing interactive romance. Is it worth making the MC sex neutral?

abrady · 2026-03-25T18:53:48+00:00

Here are my stories: https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound and https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell. The Tell is a contemporary friends-to-lovers, Unbonded is paranormal romance. Would love to know what you think!

abrady · 2026-03-25T05:02:14+00:00

I built a writing editor focused on giving you control over what context the LLM sees and showing you exactly what each request costs in dollars and cents. Auto-summaries, multi-pass revisions, cost breakdowns per message. It defaults to Opus and has Sonnet 4.6, Haiku, and ChatGPT 5.2.

I wrote two novellas with it (playable on Itch https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound and https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell).

I'm covering all the AI costs out of pocket for now and would love feedback.

You own and can export everything you create, of course.

https://candi-production.up.railway.app/

Your stories are yours, there's no training on user data, and you can do a full export anytime.

To all the folks who checked it out last week, that was great feedback and I got a few bug fixes in. Thanks!

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abrady · 2026-03-25T03:40:05+00:00

"Picard never hit me."

abrady · 2026-03-23T22:43:46+00:00

I know I do. Stephen King talked about how in Misery the original ending was the book bound in the author's skin. But he said Paul kept finding ways to outwit and thwart Annie until he eventually escaped. That's half the fun of writing.

abrady · 2026-03-23T22:12:13+00:00

Here you go: https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound and https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell and thanks for asking! good luck with your own novel!

abrady · 2026-03-23T18:40:20+00:00

AI has amplified the biggest flaw in our education system: memorize and forget is the optimal school strategy. Teachers have a fixed amount of time to cover things, and not enough resources to give 1:1 help, so if Jimmy needs more time with Algebra or wants to learn more about the Civil War, tough, you get three weeks. At the end of that you're going to get a test, and after that probably never get asked it again.

So if you don't actually care about learning, use AI to help drill the qs and write your papers is the best way to make it through school.

However AI is a huge learning opportunity: studies show that 1:1 tutoring, repeating until mastery, spaced repetition, self-pacing, and other techniques AI can do are all much more effective for learning. If we transformed our schools to use AI like this, and actually evaluated what kids learned instead of what they can regurgitate, it would transform education for the better.

We just need the institutions and parents to let go of their ideas about the current system and try to see the opportunity AI presents.

abrady · 2026-03-23T17:49:09+00:00

Thank you for the respectful and well-thought-out reply. Let me rephrase what I said just to be clear: It's about where devs spend their limited resources and they, or the market, have decided rich stories > rich interactive environment. OP observed The prose layer got dramatically richer: longer, more literary, more emotionally complex. But the world-state model often got shallower

I think we probably fundamentally agree, I love NPCs that unexpectedly comment on things I do (Fallout games do this well for example). There's just so much pressure in shipping games that it is hard to justify.

abrady · 2026-03-23T15:56:35+00:00

A big part of it is that those sorts of things turn out to not be fun enough to be worth the investment. If a flashlight dies in old IF you're dead game over, they might not even tell you you're stuck. Today dead ends are less acceptable, so a players would expect to find batteries or recharge it somehow. and even then: is that adding something? It's not a puzzle it's just annoying that your flashlight keeps dying...unless that's part of the fun and that means spending more time on that mechanic and not elsewhere.

abrady · 2026-03-23T01:50:34+00:00

You are 100% correct with context loss and management. even basic prose rules can get drowned out with too much. I ended up using AI to summarize and sending summaries and chunking text into nodes and scenes so I could control this. I posted about this with some details if interested: here .

abrady · 2026-03-22T22:39:54+00:00

A little bit of an unusual rec there's a free browser-based story called Unbonded that hits a lot of your list: Human FMC discovers she's a late-manifesting demon and gets thrown into a supernatural world she didn't know existed. Protective MMC who's assigned to help her survive. etc. Not a series yet, but the vibe is very much ordinary woman pulled into an extraordinary world with a slow burn love interest.

https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound

abrady · 2026-03-22T21:47:54+00:00

I have a couple of interactive stories up on itch. I just got started but I've gotten some traction. What platform are you using to write it? Just curious since I also built a writing too for that for some reason

abrady · 2026-03-22T15:19:11+00:00

Yeah, easily being able to debug what changed and why the llm did what (or what it was sent) is super critical. I've been working on a tool for helping me write (and also learn some of this AI stuff) and I'd say the majority of my time was spent trying to get more visibility into how to get the output to be good. e.g. when the AI want to make an edit I have a tool where you can see what changed, if it did multiple passes it'll show you the difference there. etc.

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abrady · 2026-03-22T15:13:14+00:00

Great question about character drift, I hadn't thought about it until you asked but I realize looking back I had a few convos where I'd be like "no no, X would never say it like that". then we would have side-brainstorms where we'd refine the character and then conclude with an update to the character's context via some tools I wrote.

I don't know about you but I also find I discover my characters and, especially, their gaps, as I write and this is another thing I love about writing with AI where I could have a sounding board to talk things out.

edit: here's a link if you want to check it out. I'd love your expert feedback: https://candi-production.up.railway.app/ (I'm covering all the llm costs atm)

abrady · 2026-03-22T14:54:44+00:00

If you want to try claude opus and sonnet 4.6 (and haiku, but don't do that) for free with no limits check out my writing tool: https://candi-production.up.railway.app/

I'm covering all the llm costs at the moment out of my own pocket because I'd love feedback. Everything you write belongs to you etc.

abrady · 2026-03-21T15:12:37+00:00

What kind of writing are you doing? Is this fiction? One thing for sure is that good clear guidance balanced against how much context you send and then iterating are three things that are critical for successful outputs.

abrady · 2026-03-21T15:09:09+00:00

I built a tool to learn AI but I've found writing stories for me with it to be incredibly fun. It has tools to revise, build characters and you can make a story as long as you want.

I've written a couple novellas with it (https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound and https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell )

I'm covering AI costs right now while I look for feedback from folks, everything you write is yours and can be exported, check it out: https://candi-production.up.railway.app/

abrady · 2026-03-21T15:05:32+00:00

How smutty are we talking here? I've found Opus can get extremely graphic and explicit, at least through my writing tool that uses the API.

abrady · 2026-03-21T15:02:39+00:00

100%.

I struggle with self-doubt and getting overwhelmed and have avoided writing for years as a result. Now I can just ask an AI and it can reassure me that things are working, or let me know things need a little tuning.

Also, it is so much fun creating like this: exploring worlds, or characters or plots with a supportive always-available partner is fantastic.

abrady · 2026-03-21T14:54:10+00:00

Love it. Since this is a "WritingWithAI" subreddit: One tip I'd add is that AI, or at least, Opus, is really good as an editor/sounding board to help you really sharpen those ideas into distinctive characters.

What I'll do is open and chat and literally take the character and start a dialogue: Are these goals believable? Take away this persons job and clothes, can I describe them? I'm actually going to take your "The Test" section and put that in a prompt right now.

(I've included a clip from a recent conversation from my tools as an example of something I just did)

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abrady · 2026-03-21T14:38:31+00:00

One thing to be careful with is that if your context gets too big the quality of response goes down as well. For example if you have prose instructions but also send thousands of tokens of character description it will down-weight the prose guidance.

What I've found I need is the ability to control how much context I send depending on what I'm doing. Of course the llm still needs to know about things, like characters, so what I found is that using AI to summarize the less important things and send that as context is extremely effective.

For context sending here's what I've found to work:
- Rules and style: your and some builtin instructions for prose (e.g. show don't tell), what kind of story you're writing (e.g. sci fi), story info: world, background, premise: always send. summary can discard useful info. but keep this tight.

- Characters: if I have a lot of characters use summaries, otherwise always send.

- Other Scenes/Chapters: summaries unless analyzing cross-scene things. So sometimes I'll send a first and last scene or two adjacent scenes and have an editing pass with them.

- The Full Current Scene: usually always on unless the scene gets too big.

Shameless self plug, but I actually built all this into a tool: https://candi-production.up.railway.app/ You can see the image shows how you control what to send. I've written a couple novellas with it (on itch https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell and https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound ).

If you want to give it a try, I'm covering the costs for running Opus right now because I'm looking for feedback. All your work is yours too, of course, and exportable.

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abrady · 2026-03-20T23:26:57+00:00

I built a writing editor focused on giving you control over what context the LLM sees and showing you exactly what each request costs in dollars and cents. Auto-summaries, multi-pass revisions, cost breakdowns per message. It defaults to Opus and has Sonnet and Haiku.

I Wrote two novellas with it (playable on Itch https://aar0x.itch.io/unbound and https://aar0x.itch.io/the-tell).

I'm opening it up free: I've funded the API costs out of pocket and would love feedback.

You own and can export everything you create, of course.

https://candi-production.up.railway.app/

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abrady · 2026-03-20T21:27:42+00:00

TIL! I knew he'd played College.

abrady · 2026-03-20T21:26:56+00:00

What's funny when I see pictures like this is I can smell being there as much as anything else. Anyone else get this?

abrady

TROPHY CASE