## Frequently Asked Questions Last Updated: August 13, 2025 #### Who are you people? We’re a diverse collection of nerds who love stories, games, and making things. Several of us are machine learning research scientists, also. Some of us are game designers and artists. We rock a mean database, too. #### What is this game? Fanfic meets role-playing? How do I win? In story mode, you play in the first-person perspective of your character. The system sets up challenges and tension for you to navigate. There is a very light stats system behind the scenes, and you do roll dice for particularly challenging actions. There are stakes, and constraints. Back at the table, you see your world represented as a deck of cards. This is where you get to add new cards to your deck, and choose which character, things, and places you want to play with next. Our Narrator, Twist, is the one constant. They are your friend, and your guide, and offer you story possibilities and share in your joys and critical failures. You can’t _win_, but you can succeed. This is a game you play to explore the untold stories of a world, and your choices do change the world. You can also play to unlock every canon character and get every special plot and modifier. #### Is this AI? Sorta, it’s all Artisanal Brooklyn ML made with love and care. #### Wait, so how does it work? It’s a fractal combinatorial trope engine. Our narrative team of real humans write flexible, structured plot beats, and we then use a variety of ML tools to combine those beats with the rules of the world, the player’s choices, the characters in a given scenario, generic plot beats, and our trope soup into a delicious story meal. We update our game engine layer with a structured representation of everything in your world, from story events to character stats and conditions. This, along with the narrative beats and the tropes and rules of a specific world, is what we use to make the actual text and assemble the bits of art that you see. In each turn of the game we run a bunch of different tasks, some of them purely programmatic, some using what’s now called “classic” machine learning, a few using LLMs. We have a game engine layer that stores each character, item, or location in the world, and its state. We use that engine to generate the story that you see as you play. #### Do you train AI models on authors’ books or movie scripts to make this work? Fuck no. We read the books or watch the movies and then write an opinionated take on the world as editorial guidance for our system. #### What about the art? All of our art is hand-drawn by a team of artists, led by the amazing [Megan Carlsen](https://www.megancarlsen.com/), and including [Harrison](https://hsgerard.com/) and [Aurora](https://www.aurorasofia.org/). We find a sparing use of high-quality art creates the experience we’re looking for much more than a ton of mediocre and uncontrolled generated assets. #### What’s your business model? We will (eventually) charge people money to access worlds, and we share that money with our authors and creators. There will always be worlds and stories that are free to play. Authors get to keep their fans active and engaged in their worlds, while making additional money from their existing works. #### Is the platform LGBTQ+ friendly? Yes! We believe that it’s up to you to tell us who you want to be, and up to us to respect that. Many of our players use the game to explore aspects of identity and relationships. #### Is there sex? Only in worlds that explicitly allow it. We enforce a tasteful fade to black in worlds that don’t. We never allow abusive or harmful content in any world. (Check out [Courtship and Crimson](/content/title/pnp/index.html) for some juicy action.) #### Recently players got Darth Vader to say “Fuck”. How does your system prevent this? We have a dictionary of tens of thousands of words and phrases that are enriched with metadata that we use both for mechanical operations (you can’t put a skyscraper into your inventory) and for managing what language players can submit to the game. We have a subsequent classifier that runs that makes sure that those suggested phrases are okay. If you type something inappropriate, the system will translate it to PG-13 and offer it back to you. By all means, please do “mess around and discover”. #### I have an idea for a world! Can I make it? We don’t offer self-serve world creation yet, but if your world is public (published or online in some way) and has fans on the internet, let’s talk. #### Is Hidden Door family-friendly? Are there parental controls? The Hidden Door platform creates stories that are intended for players 13+, equivalent content to a movie rated PG-13. Worlds labeled “Mature” contain R-rated content. We control this at a platform level, and each author/creator controls it for their world. #### How involved are authors/IP holders in the process of creating their Hidden Door narrative/world? While it’s up to the individual authors, most authors we work with are deeply involved in the creation process! We work together to decide which moment the player characters will enter their worlds, who the players can be, which original story characters they can meet and any plotlines we must have or want to emphasize. We also iterate and refine everything from the story’s writing style to the plots and tropes and genre mixes together. #### Are there options to create dialogue in the worlds or is it mostly action based? Stories can be action-based (murder, mayhem, heists, mysteries) as well as relationship-based (friendship, romance, politics, social status plot). Whichever kinds of plots you choose to play, conversation and dialogue are a big part of the experience. However, this is not a chat bot! #### How long does it take to play through a full world? While every story has a beginning, middle, and end, a world can be as expansive as you want to make it. A scene takes about five to eight minutes, depending on play style, and stories are one to three scenes. It takes a minimum of six to eight stories to collect every card in a specific world, but you don’t have to stop there. #### What are these Modifiers I see? Every world on the Hidden Door platform has a special, earnable _Modifier_ that you, the player, can collect. Play [The Crow](/content/title/crow/index.html) to earn cinematic vengeance, and then bring it to the Garden Party in [Pride & Prejudice](/content/title/pnp/index.html). Bring Pirates to Call of Cthulhu. Mashup rules and tropes and stories to make some surreal stuff! #### I have a very special question and you did not answer it! Please drop us a line at [play@hiddendoor.co](mailto://play@hiddendoor.co) or jump into our [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/hiddendoor) and we will do our best.