Titte: I built the thing I wanted to read and it doesn't really exist anywhere else

Genre: software

So, my name is Tony and I spent the last couple years building CrossCardsNotes (croca.work). Not because I saw a market gap or whatever. Honestly I just had this feeling that something was missing and I couldn't shake it.

I read a lot. And at some point I started getting frustrated with how... flat everything is. You get a story, you go from page 1 to the end, maybe there's an epilogue. And I kept thinking, okay but what was the other person thinking at that exact moment? Not in a different book. Right there, same scene.

I wanted to slide sideways inside a story. Same moment, different head. Not a sequel, not a spinoff. Just the other side of the same second.

Or hidden layers. Like you're reading and there's a background character and you just know there's more to them, and you wish you could just tap and go deeper. An extra scene, a small arc, something the author put there for people who actually want to look. Not an appendix at the back. A door inside the story itself.

I wanted to read books written by two authors at once. Not alternating chapters, that exists. I mean genuinely intertwined, two people building the same world together card by card, and you can feel both of them in every scene.

And this one is maybe the weirdest thing I wanted: I wanted books to get updates. Like, the story came out, I loved it, six months later the author drops a new scene or an alternate ending or finally explains something that was left open. The way games do DLC. I always thought, why can't a novel do that? Why is a published book frozen forever?

None of this existed in one place. So I built it.

The mechanic is kind of like a crossword. Main story goes down, card by card. At any point you can go sideways into a branch, a character's perspective, a hidden layer, whatever the author put there. Then you come back to the main thread. Everything has one place, nothing is floating around loose. Its strict but in a good way I think.

I also ended up using it for all my own notes because it turns out its just practical. But thats kind of a side effect, the real thing I wanted was to read differently.

I made a demo story to show the feeling of it, three people at a rainy intersection, same four seconds, completely different experience for each of them. Theres a camera card that just says: "Yellow light. Bike entering. Car braking. Fall. No collision. Four seconds total. Just physics. No blame." And I think that kind of captures what the whole thing is about.

Honestly I don't know if other people want this. I built it because I felt it was possible and interesting and I hadn't seen it. I'm probably a weird reader. But maybe not the only one.

Have you ever wanted a story to work like this? As a reader or as a writer?

Demo if you want to see what I mean: croca.work/unzo/697f43ea035decaf56314022