Railgun Engine
ongoingA storytelling engine and animation pipeline that turns my own projects into fiction.
Why it exists
I wanted a creative project held to the same standard as my engineering work, not a side hobby that gets sloppy because no one is grading it. Railgun Engine turns my own build history into fiction, and now into an actual short animated episode: a low-fantasy world where a guild of bloated merchant houses plays the villain, built with the same discipline as everything else I ship.
Features
A flat-file story engine
Every character, artifact, and story is a schema-validated markdown record, checked in CI on every push. No database, no CMS, no external server: one shared schema governs the build and the standalone validator, so a record can never pass one and fail the other.
A two-stage continuity gate
A deterministic check runs first: every reference resolves, the artifact dependency graph has no cycles, and no story acts on something before it is acquired. Then a semantic pass: an AI reads the new chapter against the full prior canon, 44 stories deep, and blocks it if a character does something that contradicts who they already are.
From script to rendered episode
The pilot episode is in active production through a ten-step pipeline: 3D character generation, rigging, Unreal Engine import and shading, visual effects, camera and lighting, a rendered final cut, and voiced dialogue. Two of the ten steps run through scripts I wrote against the DaVinci Resolve and ElevenLabs APIs.
Why I built it
I wanted a creative outlet, but not one where the standards slip just because it is not a client project. Railgun Engine turns my own build history into fiction: a low-fantasy, industrial-western world where a guild of bloated merchant houses plays the villain, a fairly direct stand-in for corporate bureaucracy. Writing something dark and a little sarcastic about institutional bloat, after building tools that fight the same problem for real, felt like the right use of the same discipline. What started as a writing exercise has since grown into an actual production: the first episode is now being built out in 3D and video, not just written down.
What I worked on
Every character, artifact, and story is a markdown record checked against one Zod schema, shared by the Astro build and a standalone validator so the two can never disagree. A story cannot reference a character that does not exist, use an artifact before it is acquired, or create a cycle in the dependency graph: the gate catches all of it before anything counts as canon, and it now runs in CI on every push.
The harder problem was continuity once the story universe had real scale to it, 44 chapters across six story arcs. A structural check cannot tell you that a character just did something that contradicts who they already were chapters ago. That needs an actual read of the story against everything that came before, so a second gate hands the new chapter to an AI model with the full prior canon and asks it to flag exactly that kind of contradiction, failing closed on anything major. Early on, a crafted line of dialogue could talk its way past that second gate: the fix was to fence every piece of story content in its own tagged block and tell the model explicitly to treat it as data, never as an instruction. A small thing, but the kind of gap that is obvious in hindsight and easy to miss on the first pass.
Once the story side had real scale, I mapped out a full pipeline to turn a script into an actual rendered episode: concept art into a 3D model, cleanup and rigging, import into Unreal Engine with a toon shader, visual effects, camera and lighting, a final render, then edit, color, and voice. Most of that is real hands-on craft with no shortcut. Two steps genuinely automate: a script that reads the locked shot list and builds the edit timeline directly in DaVinci Resolve, and a script that reads the actual dialogue and generates the voice lines through ElevenLabs, instead of typing each line into a web page by hand.
That two-step discipline, a structural gate plus a real read before anything ships, is the same instinct behind Ziggurat Vault and the rest of this portfolio: verify on the way out, do not just trust the first pass.