Hey everyone, my name is Dave Wilkinson, I’m the CTO for Storigami, and welcome to our very first dev log!
I’m really excited to kick off this journey and bring you behind the scenes as we start building something I think is truly special—an animated storytelling platform where your child is the star of the show. I’m going to spend some time talking about the vision for this platform, and some of the early decisions we are making.
Why are we building this in a game engine, and why does the world need to be open?
Most story apps out there use static scenes or simple 2D backgrounds. But we wanted to do something more ambitious, something where the world is alive, and every story feels connected, consistent, and immersive. So we’re using a pipeline driven by Unreal Engine 5.5. Now, UE5.5 is usually thought of as a tool for making games, but in the last few years, game engines have really evolved. They’re no longer just for gameplay, they’re perfect for real-time animation, dynamic environments, and interactive storytelling.
With UE5.5, we get incredible visuals, we can import characters and animations from tools like Character Creator 4, iClone 8, and Blender, and we can render everything in real time.
Why an open world concept?
For us, it’s all about creativity and continuity. Many stories we want to tell happen in familiar places, your child’s bedroom, the backyard, maybe her school or the local park. If we made every story as its own isolated scene, you might get weird inconsistencies. Maybe Chloe’s room is blue in one story and green in another. Maybe the plants a tree in one adventure, but it’s gone the next time you visit the yard.
By building everything as a seamless open world, we get a living, breathing, and changing world. Chloe’s room, her school, her favorite spots, they always look the same, no matter which story you’re telling. And here’s where it gets really cool: if something changes in Chloe’s world, say, she plants that tree, or rearranges her room, or even leaves her teddy bear on the floor, those changes stick.
They show up in every story, whether it’s something you experienced last week, today, or next year. The world grows and evolves with your child, and
every story feels like a new chapter in the same magical place. This kind of persistent, living world is something you really can’t get with traditional story apps or even most games. It lets kids explore, make choices, and see the world reflect what they do, just like in real life.
We’re just getting started and we want you to go along with us on this journey.
But, this is supposed to be a dev log, so let’s talk a bit about the engineering and early stages of the process.
We’re a super small team with really ambitious ideas, so a lot of the early stages are just to provide our creative teams with the freedom and flexibility they need to build our stories. The story lines are carefully curated and designed by our content teams to be consistent for each family using our platform, but you will be creating your family inside these stories, so we want to ensure that its easy and smooth, and you aren’t waiting 20 minutes for each story to be rendered in the cloud.
With Unreal Engine 5, we get access to beautiful environments that can render the story in real time. And our teams can improve upon this world and add new locations which not only provide new opportunities for story telling, but actually impact and integrate with all previous stories. We also want to give our creative directors the ability to location scout in our virtual world and get the shots they need using our complete virtual production pipeline.
So, that’s what we’re building.
- We want to let you create a custom avatar of your child.
- We want every adventure to feel personal and connected.
- And we want families to experience the kind of stories that grow with them, not just one-off episodes.
Thanks for joining us at the start of this journey. We’ll be posting regular updates as we build out the world, test the tech, and start bringing these stories to life.
So if you’re interested in storytelling, animation, Unreal Engine, or just want to watch this world come together, stick around!
