novel-to-game

NovelToGame is seven open-source skills for the coding agent you already use (Claude Code, Codex, or Kimi Code). Give it a novel and, if you have one in mind, a target platform or engine. It reads the whole book, chooses a game direction it can defend, designs the world and the look, builds for the runtime the brief locks, and proves the build plays in one recorded run. You get a playable build at the finish level you asked for, plus the design documents behind it. The three public examples below play in a browser right now, no install.

Play Online

Each game links to the adaptation workspace behind it: source provenance, the concept and the directions it rejected, game and art direction, runnable source, and the QA record from the playable path.

Journey to the West · Three Borrowings of the Banana Fan

One wave of a fan blew you fifty thousand li. Take the mountain back one turn at a time.

Command Wukong's party through the three borrowings of the Banana-Leaf Fan: read the five-element wheel, follow a fire-vein treasure map, decide when to press deeper or bank the haul, set your formation, transform your way in where force will not work, and turn a demon king who outclasses you into a rainstorm over the Mountain of Flames.

Play in browser · Adaptation workspace · design estimate: 45–90 min · all ages · playable prototype

Jin Ping Mei · Ledger of Desire

Choose whose door you enter tonight. Find out whose door knocks in the morning.

Twenty days, five courtyards. Keep silver, influence, reputation, exposure, and household strain in balance; respect each woman's terms; build trust through shared crises; and face a final ledger shaped by what everyone chose and remembers.

Play in browser · Adaptation workspace · design estimate: 60–90 min · 18+ · playable prototype

Project Plateau · The Lost World · 3D

A real-time first-person 3D field-photography game adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Cross a connected plateau, observe a living Iguanodon family, expose four glass plates under aerial pressure, and return with the views that survived.

Play the full expedition on desktop, or watch the 15-second gameplay preview on other devices.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/27819247-4e4d-4bf0-8f0f-43d4125c4d45

Play in your browser — no install · Adaptation workspace · Share feedback · design estimate: 1–3 min · desktop WebGL2 · playable prototype

What it is

There is no GPU, no hosted service, and no bundled engine: the skills run on the model of whichever agent you installed them into. A one-line "turn this book into a game" prompt usually yields a reskin or a clickable plot summary, so the work is split into stages. Each stage owns one document, and every decision in it has to cite evidence:

• Every design decision cites the novel. Analysis reads the whole book and writes a SOURCE_BIBLE where every hard rule, key character goal, turning point and ending, and signature anchor carries its chapter or file location, and every adaptation-boundary row cites its evidence. Source facts are labelled immutable, adaptable, open, or conflicted; anything the novel does not define is marked a design invention, never smuggled in as fact.
• The game shape is a documented decision, not a default. The concept stage compares real alternatives and kills directions with named hard vetoes (the core loop ignores the novel's central tension; strip the proper nouns and a generic template remains; the player only spends resources to release a fixed plot). Concept, world design, and art direction are written by different stages into different documents, and the build may not quietly redesign them.
• Built for the runtime the brief locks. The product brief, the one-page requirements sheet the agent drafts first (in quick it stops for your decision only on blocking items such as platform, rights, or adult content), locks platform, engine, target runtime, and the runtime actually available for testing. A missing toolchain may not silently become a web build. The design documents are engine-independent Markdown you own.
• QA is one real run, six checks, and honest limitations. The build is launched on the tested runtime and one complete execution proves launch, render, input, coreLoop, outcome, and restart. Fun, balance, other browsers, and rights are written as limitations, never as PASS.
• Voice is opt-in and generated at build time by default. No line goes to a text-to-speech provider unless art direction chooses voice; runtime synthesis needs the product brief's explicit approval, and the novel and design documents are never uploaded.

Interactive fiction is a first-class track: continuous scenes, dialogue, testimony, and key choices can carry the whole game, held to the same agency and evidence requirements as a systems game.

Install

Prerequisite: you already use Claude Code, Codex, or Kimi Code, and npx (Node.js) runs in your terminal.

Agent CLI	Install	Invoke
Claude Code	npx skills add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game -g -y -a claude-code -s '*'	/novel-to-game
Codex	npx skills add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game -g -y -a codex -s '*'	$novel-to-game
Kimi Code	npx skills add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game -g -y -a kimi-code-cli -s '*'	/skill:novel-to-game

-g installs globally for every directory; drop it to install into the current directory only. To update, run the same command again, or npx skills update.

Install adapters for all three CLIs on the same machine:

npx skills add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game -g -y -s '*' \
  -a claude-code -a codex -a kimi-code-cli

Cloning the repository also enables project-local skill discovery in all three CLIs.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game
/plugin install novel-to-game@novel-to-game-skills
/novel-to-game:novel-to-game quick

Codex

codex plugin marketplace add zenstory-ai/novel-to-game
codex plugin add novel-to-game@novel-to-game-skills

Kimi Code 0.27 or newer

/plugins install https://github.com/zenstory-ai/novel-to-game
/reload
/skill:novel-to-game quick

Changes are in CHANGELOG.md and Releases. The repository moved from worldwonderer/novel-to-game to zenstory-ai/novel-to-game; install and marketplace commands from older docs no longer resolve, and the commands above are current.

See what it produces

Every excerpt below is copied from a file in this repository; the two Chinese examples keep their documents in Simplified Chinese, so those excerpts are translated here and marked as such, with the originals linked. Cuts are marked with "…".

What the design documents look like

In Journey to the West, the Banana-Leaf Fan (owned by Rakshasi, the Bull Demon King's wife) enters the analysis as facts pinned to chapters, in analysis/SOURCE_BIBLE.md (translated; 3 of the table's 11 rows):

| Fact | Evidence |
|---|---|
| The true fan quells fire with one wave, raises wind with two, brings rain with three; Rakshasi first blows Wukong away with it, and he returns after obtaining the wind-fixing pill from Bodhisattva Lingji | Chapter 59 |
| Wukong turns into an insect and enters her belly to force the fan out of her, but receives a fake; the fake fan raises the flames three times in a row | Chapter 59 |
…
| The Bull Demon King also commands the seventy-two transformations; disguised as Bajie he tricks the true fan back, and Wukong, flushed with success, does not look closely | Chapter 61 |

concepts/CONCEPT.md turns the fan into a two-sided rule, the fake fan feeding the fire and the true fan's three waves turning the boss fight, and records which rival directions died, and on which veto (translated):

Hard-veto results (one line per direction):

- Direction 1 · Three Borrowings of the Banana Fan: passes (none of the six triggered).
- Direction 2 · The Westward Post Road: triggers item 2 — within the slice length, relationship building decays into event buttons and stat bars with no repeatable trade-off — eliminated.
- Direction 3 · Two Hearts: triggers item 3 — in the novel the true and the false are told apart by the Buddha, so the player's core tension cannot become a reliable mechanic (it would need a tell the novel does not contain) — eliminated.

design/GAME_DESIGN.md gives each wave exact effects and durations, and says why the timing of the third wave is the final battle's core decision (translated):