Development build: the left entrance opens the visual novel, the right one opens the interactive writing tool.
The Ithaca Journal is a Research through Design project that puts a visual novel and an interactive writing tool in one work. We are still finishing the novel's story, its staging, and a playable build.
A short, authored visual novel. A young developer comes to an unfamiliar city for a job interview, carrying a journal application he built earlier, The Ithaca Journal, as his portfolio piece. He reopens it, polishes it, presents it, and the project ends where there is no next version. The writing tool appears inside that story: the player watches it being used, uses it, and watches it being judged.
The story is written as prose in an authoring source of its own, and the application presents that source rather than containing it. Scenes are addressed by their place in the structure, not by their titles, so rewriting, retitling or reordering never invalidates the progress someone has already saved. Each scene declares which world it belongs to, and images, chapter cards and animation are chosen when the scene is presented, which lets reality and the design draft stay apart without rewriting the text.
Before the story can be played through or handed to anyone else, it is checked as a whole: entry point, links, reachability, endings, unfinished placeholders. Choices change local feedback and pacing, and they do not branch into several different products.
The pages the developer writes inside the story come from the same tool we use to write the story. The journal makes the fiction, the fiction shows the journal being used and judged, and the way the story is written is also what the story is about.
The tool is inherited rather than invented for the story. The desk, topic board, mailbox and bookshelf, including the earlier attempt to rearrange them into a themed journey, are carried into the novel as the developer's own design draft, so the earlier version stays something the story can look at, use and doubt.
Reality and the design draft stay separate in text and in staging. The character lives in an ordinary rented room in the city, while the journal's room exists only inside the design draft. Keeping the two apart is what lets the inherited tool stay a designed object inside the story rather than the world the character lives in.
The product release, the content revision and the save schema remain distinct, and none of them names the story. The early desktop prototype survives as the legacy branch, for reference rather than as the development line.
The home screen keeps two independent entrances:
| Entrance | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Visual novel: start the journey | The authored developer meta-story. |
| Writing tool: The Ithaca Journal | The desk, the topic board, the mailbox, and the bookshelf, used on their own. |
This is the design direction currently in production, not a research finding already backed by participant evidence.