About Journeys

Journeys began with three stories my wife wrote. Medha is a family medicine doctor, and she built three branching cases for trauma-informed healthcare education: you play a migrant crossing a border, seeking care, and managing a condition, and you feel the choices and the dead ends before you ever meet someone like them in a clinic. Clinicians walked them and came out changed. She has taught with them at several hospitals and at family medicine conferences in Philadelphia and Atlanta.

Medha wrote the cases in Twine, a free tool for interactive fiction. To get them onto the web, I wrote a gloriously hacky script that scraped the HTML Twine exports, pulled every passage and its links out of the markup, and turned them into JSON that a small Astro app rendered as a static site. That worked, but it was fragile. Changing a word meant editing in Twine, re-exporting, re-running the script, and redeploying. The shape of a story — where it branched, where it looped, where it ended — could only be seen by clicking through it. Nothing recorded where participants went. And only one person could practically write.

What Journeys is

Journeys generalises those cases. An author builds a journey as a graph of steps and choices on a visual canvas, sees its whole shape at once, and publishes an immutable version that participants walk from a link without an account. Analytics are drawn on the graph itself, so you see which paths participants took. A step can pose an open question whose answers are kept for the project’s members to read. Steps carry rich text with images and credits, and each journey can have its own theme. Projects have members, authors can keep a public page, and every published journey carries a link preview.

Medha’s three cases were rebuilt from the legacy site in September 2026 and live here as the demo, so you can Play a Journey — no account needed.

Who it is for

Educators, trainers, and writers: anyone who wants a reader to make a choice and live with it. If that is you, sign in with Google or Discord, create a project, and start a draft. The guide walks through the rest.

— Paul