A decision we made early: document everything.
Not for accountability, exactly. Not because we think the process is the product. But because the thing we’re trying to build - a new storytelling format - is genuinely uncertain, and we think that uncertainty is worth showing.
Most studios reveal their work when it’s finished. You see the polished thing. You don’t see the six months of wrong turns that preceded it, the conversations where someone said “actually I think we’ve been approaching this backwards,” the moment where the whole project nearly collapsed and then didn’t.
We’ve decided to show the wrong turns.
Why that’s hard
There’s an obvious risk here: you document your uncertainty, and people conclude you don’t know what you’re doing.
That risk is real. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the alternative has its own problem. You build in private, you reveal when finished, and you lose the most interesting part of the process - the period where the thing is half-formed and the decisions are still genuinely open.
Walt Disney filmed Disneyland being built. The TV show wasn’t a marketing exercise. It was the actual story: a man obsessed with building something that hadn’t existed before, working through the problems in real time. By the time the park opened, the audience had spent months watching him try to solve it. They were invested in a way that no amount of advertising could have achieved.
The unfinished thing, documented honestly, is more compelling than the finished thing revealed all at once.
What we’ll document
Two kinds of update, as they happen:
The thinking. The essays are about narrative craft in general - questions we’re working through that apply beyond this specific project. If we write about why stories have edges, that’s useful regardless of whether Chapterists succeeds or fails. The thinking stands on its own.
The build. The build logs are specific. What we made this week. What broke. What we changed our minds about. Why we chose one approach over another. These will only make sense in the context of the project, but they’ll be more honest than anything we could put in a press release.
We’ll be careful about what we share. Some things are genuinely not ready. Some decisions aren’t ours alone to make public. We’re not going to publish half-finished code or unfinished world-building just for the sake of transparency.
But the direction, the reasoning, the failures that led to better approaches: those we’ll show.
Where we are right now
The website you’re reading is the first public artefact. It doesn’t say much yet. That’s intentional - we didn’t want to make promises before we had a clearer sense of the shape of the thing.
That shape is getting clearer.
More soon.