Pogona

Pogona is my authoring tool for choose-your-own-adventure style games — a service for building the games rather than playing them.

I wanted a proper backend for defining games, scenes, and items instead of hand-editing data files: a game is a collection of scenes with branching options, each option carrying conditions and effects like moving to another scene or granting an item, all reachable over ConnectRPC and a CLI. Finished games are handed off to Ibis, which owns the actual game files and object storage, so Pogona stays focused on authoring. The name is the bearded dragon’s genus.

Pogona is my authoring tool for choose-your-own-adventure style games — a service for building the games rather than playing them. I wanted a proper backend for defining games, scenes, and items instead of hand-editing data files: a game is a collection of scenes with branching options, each option can carry conditions and effects like moving to another scene or granting an item, and it’s all reachable over a real API (ConnectRPC) and a CLI, not just baked into one game’s source.

Finished games get handed off to Ibis, a companion service of mine that owns the actual game files and object storage, so Pogona itself can stay focused on authoring rather than hosting. The name comes from the bearded dragon’s genus — Pogona.