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. Walk back, take the quest, and win the mountain one turn at a time.

A Fantasy Westward Journey-style turn-based RPG built on chapters 59–61. Click to walk four painted scene maps, find the NPCs marked "!", let the quest tracker auto-path you there, and take the repeatable demon-bounty daily between story fights. Earn experience and silver, shop, swap gear, study skills and field a pet; then win command-turn battles with the five-element wheel, rage stunts and Wukong's seventy-two transformations, until a demon king who outclasses you ends as rain 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

That spring, five doors kept a lamp lit for you. Whatever you say, they remember.

A galgame-style romance ADV set in the Ximen household the spring after Li Ping'er marries in. A common route puts all five women at one table, in one night of rain and at one Qingming feast; what your choices build with each of them decides which courtyard doors are still lit on the night the routes split. Each of the five heroine routes has a good, an ordinary and a missed ending (16 endings, counting the one where no lamp is left), and every heroine ending turns to a fixed page of what the novel does to her (the no-lamp ending turns to Ximen Qing's death and the household scattering). Auto, read-only skip, backlog, hide, quick save, thumbnail saves and rollback are there, with a CG gallery, scene replay, music room and ending flowchart.

Play in browser · Adaptation workspace · design estimate: 20–30 min per route, 1–1.5 h for all five · 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. Under a low western sun, walk out from Fort Challenger through knee-high grass, keep to a band of thorn arches for cover, and expose four glass plates through a long lens. Each plate is graded on the spot from what the live camera actually framed, with stamps and a line from the sceptical Summerlee. A pterodactyl circles before it dives, a stegosaurus may come down to drink at the brook, and you have 300 seconds of light to bring the plates back.

Play the full expedition on desktop, or watch the 15-second gameplay preview on other devices. It is a real capture of the current build.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5ad62a58-1abe-4d73-b86e-1c8c6563fdb2

Play in your browser — no install · Adaptation workspace · Share feedback · design estimate: 5–10 min (300 s of light per run) · 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.
• A borrowed genre comes with its shell. Players recognise a genre by more than its core mechanic, so a systems game lists which parts of the genre's shell (entering the world, objective guidance, progression and reasons to return) it implements, degrades, or drops and why, and what the first minute shows. A Fantasy Westward Journey-style RPG is not shipped as a bare chain of fights.
• 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. On a character route, a key choice targets that character's own wound or agenda, and the relationship shows in reactions, forms of address, the places that open to you and what you are trusted with, not in an on-screen number.

Install

ClawHub

ClawHub distribution is governed by the repository's explicit publish inventory, with discovery through [ClawHu