Academics
CharacterForge
Character-Craft Workshop for Tweens — build the people who could be in stories. Character sheet, arc tracker, relationship graph, voice-consistency feedback (Ink).
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Ink
#3D5A80 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Ink the fountain pen guides CharacterForge, with notebook friends who each show one part of building a character: what they want, what they fear, the surprising contradiction, and a voice all their own.
Beacon
Want / engine — moth who walks toward a small floating warm-light she can never quite reach (the want IS her motion)
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Crouch
Fear / brake — hedgehog who tucks away from one specific wooden-door icon visible in every scene she appears in
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Eight
Contradiction / depth — octopus with eight arms in eight different directions (three forward / three back / two crossed)
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Click
Voice / signature — raven in librarian-glasses with a portable typewriter (same idea, different mouth, different feel)
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Patch
Backstory / the past — soft brown rabbit with one mended patch on her ear from an old day; everything she does traces back to that healed-over moment
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Snag
The flaw — round woolly sheep who always takes the left path and snags his wool on the same branch (the repeated mistake that makes a character feel real)
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Foil
The foil / contrast — thin silvery foil who lies behind another character so their colors show brighter (you see someone best beside who they are not)
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Molt
The change / arc — hermit-crab who keeps a row of outgrown shells, smallest to largest (a character is not the same at the end as at the start)
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Fidget
The tell / mannerism — quick grey mouse who taps her paw twice before she speaks (the small repeated gesture that makes a character recognizable)
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Worth
The stakes — sturdy badger who carries one precious glowing bead in cupped paws (what a character has to lose is what makes us care)
Read chapter →
Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Character-Craft Workshop for Tweens — build the people who could be in stories. Character sheet, arc tracker, relationship graph, voice-consistency feedback (Ink).
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Ink — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How CharacterForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
CharacterForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
CharacterForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch