The Story Pack Works (Locally)

After several days of building the story pack generator, I finally had the Jekyll & Hyde story working on my local development environment.

18 story nodes, 6 choice points, MBTI personality tracking, 5 different endings based on your choices. It looked good on my laptop.

Then I deployed it to production.

Nothing worked.

404 Errors Everywhere

The story page loaded, but:

  • Images returned 404 errors
  • The personality calculator couldn’t find its data file
  • Links between story nodes broke
  • The ending screen showed error messages instead of personality results

Classic web development problem: works perfectly locally, breaks in production.

File Path Hell

The issue was with how Astro (the static site generator I’m using) handles file paths. In local development mode, it uses one path structure. In production build mode, it uses a different structure.

I spent hours with Claude trying to understand Astro’s asset handling. Should files go in the public directory? Or in content collections? How do relative paths work versus absolute paths?

Eventually we figured out the solution: use absolute paths everywhere for the story pack files.

Changed all the file references from:

./jekyll-and-hyde/opening.png

To:

/stories/jekyll-and-hyde/opening.png

Built again. Deployed. Everything worked.

MBTI Personality Tracking

The other big piece I finished today was the personality tracking system.

At 6 different points in the Jekyll & Hyde story, you make choices. Each choice adds points to different MBTI dimensions:

  • Extroversion (E) vs Introversion (I)
  • Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N)
  • Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F)
  • Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)

At the end, it calculates your personality type and shows you one of 5 thematic endings.

For example, if you score high on T (Thinking) and J (Judging), you might get the “Scientific Legacy” ending where you approach Jekyll’s experiments analytically.

If you score high on F (Feeling) and P (Perceiving), you might get the “Compassionate Intervention” ending where you try to save Jekyll through empathy.

It’s not scientifically accurate MBTI, obviously. But it’s engaging enough for social sharing, which is the goal.

Next: Korean Version

Now that the English version works, I need to create a Korean version of Jekyll & Hyde. That means translating all 18 story nodes while keeping the same choice structure and personality tracking.

The Korean market loves MBTI content, so I’m expecting the Korean version to perform better than English for social sharing.

To be continued…