Tales app’s former art director rose from the ashes to push a new competitor to Episodes, and it uses AI responsibly

Samuel Gutierrez helped build something special. Tales was a place where writers could create rich, visual, branching stories. A genuine competitor to Episode Interactive and Choice of Games, with higher production values and tools that actually respected the people using them. Then, in early 2023, it was gone.

Not because the product was bad. Not because the community abandoned it. Tales died because the money ran out at exactly the wrong moment, right when the entire tech funding world stopped caring about anything that wasn’t AI.

Now Gutierrez is back. And the same technology that helped kill Tales is the foundation he’s building on.

What he is building is called MindInk

MindInk is a new AI-powered interactive storytelling platform. It is designed to give any creator the tools to write, build, and publish rich visual stories without needing a team, a budget, or any technical background. No coding. No scripting. No barriers between the idea in your head and the story on screen.

If you want to avoid AI use, then you can. It does not force a single bit of AI on you. So you can be free to do what you’d like, how you like it.

It is fully web-based, which means stories can be published and read on any device without an app download. Branching dialogue and the core creator tools are already working. And unlike most AI tools that treat image generation as a one-shot prompt process, MindInk is built around keeping characters and visuals consistent across an entire story.

Gutierrez is currently solo, but the platform already has a small group of beta users. The goal, long term, is to be a real creative home where people can build their own worlds and own their own IP.

The slow collapse nobody saw coming

It was not one single failure. Tales ran out of runway in early 2023, but the trouble had been building for a while. When the platform was trying to raise its next round of funding, ChatGPT launched and changed everything about how investors thought.

“When we were trying to raise again, GPT and generative AI exploded into the market, and suddenly the funding landscape got very strange,” Gutierrez said. “It felt like investors paused unless a company was fully and explicitly AI-first.”

Tales was also simply expensive to run. Supporting many genres at a high quality level meant heavy art production and a big team. The ambition was real, but the tools to support it at a sustainable cost did not yet exist.

“In some ways, we were early,” he said. “We were trying to do something very ambitious before the current generation of AI tools existed to help with the most tedious and time-consuming parts of creation.”

The community that refused to move on

After Tales went quiet, the community did something unexpected. Creators kept publishing. They kept helping each other and kept the energy alive with no platform support behind them. That, Gutierrez says, was the real signal.

“The community never really let it die,” he said. “That told me there was still real demand for something like it. Unfinished demand.”

The timing had also shifted in his favor. Building Tales at the quality level he wanted had been brutally expensive in 2022. Today, AI tools make that same quality reachable for a much smaller team. The vision was the same. The economics finally made sense.

He is bringing back the good parts and leaving the rest behind

MindInk is bringing back the things that made Tales worth using. The character creator, libraries of reusable digital characters, and a more advanced visual canvas are all coming back. Those were the tools that made creators feel like they were actually directing something, not just typing into a box.

What is not coming back is the old manual coding and scripting barrier. MindInk is built around a no-code, node-based visual flow. Creators can shape stories and structure branching paths visually, without any of the technical friction Tales used to require.

The old premium gem system is also off the table for now. Gutierrez says he wants to talk to the community before any monetization decision is made, and that whatever system eventually exists should work for both creators and readers rather than just copying what came before.

The hardest AI problem is keeping characters consistent

One of the biggest problems with AI image generation right now is consistency. A character can look completely different from one scene to the next. For a story platform, that is a serious issue.

Gutierrez says solving this was one of the first things he locked in. MindInk is built around reference-driven generation, meaning characters have a visual memory that carries across the full story. He frames the whole approach as art direction rather than image generation.

“The workflow is about directing a persistent world, not fishing for isolated images until something looks close enough,” he said.

New creators will not get lost in the crowd

Tales had a real problem with discoverability. New writers struggled to get noticed unless they already had an audience. Gutierrez wants MindInk to work differently, with dedicated spaces for new creators, first stories, and fresh releases so that getting started does not mean being invisible.

“If new creators feel invisible, they usually don’t stay,” he said.

The long-term goal is a real home for creators to build and own their own IP, starting small and growing into something much bigger over time. “For creators, I want it to feel like they finally have real tools to bring the thing in their head to life at a much higher level,” he said. “For readers, I want it to feel like they’re stepping into richer, more immersive story experiences.”

The AI wave that collapsed Tales in 2023 is now the exact reason MindInk is possible. Gutierrez is one of the pioneers for responsible AI use, and we hope more people treat AI as a tool, not as a replacement for a person.