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The Narrative Design platform built for the full game lifecycle

Tarinoi is a world for making worlds: a living environment where writers, narrative designers, artists, programmers, producers, and all the other craftspeople who bring a story to life work together in one shared space.

At its centre lies story: not as a department or a document, but as the organising principle of creation. Writers craft dialogue and structure; artists shape mood and tone; producers guide progress; engineers connect story to code; localisation, QA, and VO directors add their own voices — all see the same truth through their own lens.

Tarinoi exists because creativity has too long been constrained by the tooling. It was built to let people work the way their minds already move: visually, associatively, collaboratively.

Because when the tools disappear, the story can finally breathe.

Who we are

Petteri
CEO / CTO
I shipped my first piece of software at the age of fourteen. Thirty-five years later, after two decades building SaaS and enterprise products, I joined ZA/UM — the studio behind Disco Elysium — to work on narrative tooling. Five years in the middle of one of the most ambitious storytelling efforts in the medium showed me first-hand what a difference tooling makes, both to creative freedom and the ability to deliver. Tarinoi is my effort to make this difference for everyone.
I shipped my first piece of software at the age of fourteen. Thirty-five years later, after two decades building SaaS and enterprise products, I joined ZA/UM — the studio behind Disco Elysium — to work on narrative tooling. Five years in the middle of one of the most ambitious storytelling efforts in the medium showed me first-hand what a difference tooling makes, both to creative freedom and the ability to deliver. Tarinoi is my effort to make this difference for everyone.
Sally
CDO
As a UI/UX Engineer, I love taking interesting problems and designing workflows that are simple, approachable, even fun - and leave users feeling confident, not confused. During my time at ZA/UM I brought these skills to narrative tooling. The unique challenges around game design and studio workflows mean it's crucial to know when to stick to the standard patterns, and when to innovate. Getting it right means talking to users from the start, watching how they work and understanding exactly what they need. Great tools remove friction, aid collaboration and let people build something remarkable.
Bluesky
As a UI/UX Engineer, I love taking interesting problems and designing workflows that are simple, approachable, even fun - and leave users feeling confident, not confused. During my time at ZA/UM I brought these skills to narrative tooling. The unique challenges around game design and studio workflows mean it's crucial to know when to stick to the standard patterns, and when to innovate. Getting it right means talking to users from the start, watching how they work and understanding exactly what they need. Great tools remove friction, aid collaboration and let people build something remarkable.
Bluesky

Idea to delivery

Tarinoi is built around the story through its entire lifecycle, from the first moodboard to the final voice session. It's designed for the whole studio working together, in real time, and at their own pace. You decide what your game is and how you want to make it; Tarinoi lets you make the building blocks. Your content lives in an open, human-readable format and is sent to a repository you control: you are never locked out of your data. You get a creative environment that gives you the tools to express your ideas, and the production support to deliver with less pain, less friction, and less cost. You get to focus on what actually matters: making a better game.

Areas we address

Collaborate
Online and offline
Work on boards together, in real time. Go offline, for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days. When you're back, we'll sync your changes with the rest of the project. Request feedback, refine and polish together, then commit when you're ready.
Template
Shape your environment
Define your functions and variables. Describe your structures: interactions, logic, characters, quests, objects, interactions and behaviour. It's your game: you decide how it works.
Scale
As broad, deep or complex as you like
Putting 10,000 cards on a board or a million in your game is probably a bad idea, but we won't stop you. The size, depth, and complexity of your game is limited by your imagination, not your tools.
Produce
Plan, track and ship with studio-grade control
We understand production reality. Integrate to your pipelines. Organise the work, track team progress and hit delivery milestones. Localise, record voiceover, cut releases. Tarinoi gives you the tools to deliver on schedule.

Enterprise-grade engineering

Tarinoi is engineered with craft and care. It will scale with you and your projects. Security, privacy, regulatory compliance, and data isolation are architectural. You own and control your data, and our formats are portable, documented, and human-readable. Our tech stack is boring in the good way: widely used, well maintained, and battlefield-tested. We innovate where it counts, but use tried and true solutions for solved problems.

This shows in the details: deterministic behaviour, predictable performance, and a codebase built to be maintained and extended over years, not patched around. We hold our software to the same standard we'd apply to any system any company depends on in its core operations.

How we help you

For Writers
Crafted with writers at the centre
Craft complex, branching, reactive narratives. Move seamlessly between real-time online collaboration and offline mode, alternative views and keyboard-only workflow, with a clean, modern interface that's familiar, intuitive and fun to work in. Play back your work in Tarinoi, or in-engine. Every phase of production makes different demands. Tarinoi adapts with you, whether you're storyboarding, editing with your coworkers in real-time, or deeply immersed in writing.
For Producers
Built to help you ship
Producers need the whole picture, across teams, boards, chapters, and sprints. Reduce time chasing status updates by tracking progress directly aginst your milestones, giving you a clear picture of where delivery is heading as work moves through the pipeline. Assign workflows, control access and lock content when it's ready. Plan with confidence, spot risk early and keep the project moving in the right direction.
For Designers
Fine-tune the details
Define your templates, variables, lists and functions in Tarinoi, then bind to implementations in-engine. Adjust the conditions behind an encounter, rebalance a branch that's grown too long, or review a character's contributions across the narrative. Direct access to the logic that drives the game, surfaced in the way designers think.
For VO Recording
From the script to the recording booth
Session planning and generating scripts, line tracking and pickups - VO requires a ton of coordination, and we've sat in the recording studio working with the experts to get these tools right. Plan sessions by character or by actor, and make every hour in the booth count. Flag changes and lock the lines that are done. Support your cast with customisable views and fully contextual scripts showing exactly where their lines sit in the narrative.
For Localisation
Translate without the guesswork
Localisers need format flexibility and, crucially, narrative context. Export in the format you need and import finished translations back in. Track your progress at a glance. Manage drift. Work with the full context visible and see where each line sits in the narrative, so your translations land the way they're meant to.
For the Studio
The heart of the game - and the studio
We know what great studio tooling requires. This is why we built Tarinoi - one tool that covers the full development lifecycle, from first pitch to release, early-access demo to the anniversary DLC, designed for every team, at any scale, at every stage of production. Fewer licences, reduced friction, less time spent keeping separate tools in sync. More time making your game.

Shape what comes next

Tarinoi is in active development and we're building it with the people who'll use it. If you're a narrative designer working with complex branching content, a designer crafting the logic, a solo dev with a big idea, or an ambitious studio looking for tooling that fits your pipeline - we want to hear from you.

Show us how you work, get early access to what we're building, and help shape the features that matter most.

For studios

Interested in collaborating?

We're working directly with studios and narrative teams building bold, choice-driven narratives and innovative storytelling systems. Get early access to the pilot, and join us in shaping Tarinoi.

Early access

Join the mailing list

We'll keep you updated on what we're building, and you'll be among the first to be invited to try Tarinoi.

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