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In 2024, I joined a small team working on a clone of Character AI. I had the opportunity to be mentored by someone from Google Brain Lab, which provided me with the foundation for building emotionally responsive characters. However, I wanted to go further, to turn that tech into something more interactive, more playful. The team wasn’t on the same page, and eventually, the whole thing fell apart. That’s when the idea for Dream Novel started to form – kind of out of nowhere, during a conversation with my brother. He’s a huge fan of Visual Novels, and he has some experience with AI image and text generation. We were talking, and something just clicked: what if we used all this LLM tech not for chatbots, but for storytelling – dynamic, branching, evolving stories where the player matters? I started building the engine that night. First, just a basic prototype for generating scenes and dialogue using AI. Then, more structure. Then, the narrative systems. Before I knew it, I was working full-time on it.Now, Dream Novel is a real thing. We’re still early, but it’s coming together in a way that feels exciting and weirdly personal. My brother’s still involved too – helping as an external tester, sharing ideas, giving me honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback. But the most brutal feedback I got when I posted it in r/visualnovels – I thought that they would like such a product, but I got a lot of hate because of using AI. I realise that they didn’t even test it, and I would like to know if the audience is not ready to accept this product, or if I am moving in the wrong direction and should change the concept. So, if you would like to join the beta test, you are very welcome – dream-novel.com submitted by /u/IfnotFr |