Sifty is a boutique software studio founded by James Ryan. We are building author-centric AI systems for art and entertainment, with a particular focus on storytelling technologies. 'AI' here is broadly construed to cover a wide range of symbolic and generative techniques, but always with an emphasis on authorial control.
You've found our home on GitHub, which houses the repositories associated with our software offerings.
Sifty builds source-available systems: non-commercial use is freely permitted, commercial use requires a license, and anyone can view all of the code. We also plan to dust off a few older systems, like Talk of the Town and Expressionist, for release here under MIT licenses, with expanded documentation.
Our first software offering is Viv, an engine for emergent narrative with story sifting.
In emergent narrative, stories arise from the bottom up, as characters take action in a simulated storyworld, rather than being authored from the top down. Viv offers technical narrative designers (and novices) a custom programming language affording rich specifications of character actions, as well as constructs that drive story sifting—the task of identifying emergent storylines in a given simulation instance, such as a videogame playthrough.
The project ships a compiler, a JavaScript runtime, and plugins for JetBrains, VS Code, Sublime Text, and Claude Code. We have also written extensive documentation, including a complete language reference.
