ReelPlay Has Rebranded to Myrlo
What Hapepned to ReelPlay?
The movie studio thing seemed clever at first. You're "casting" AI characters, working on virtual "sets", it felt clever and set the app apart a bit.. but it kept confusing people. Everyone expected video generation when what I'd actually built was roleplaying app where you explore stories with your AI companions.
Plus, another AI company launched with the same name while I was sorting this out.
What Myrlo actually is
When I was designing the app, my core idea ws the mixing and matching concept. I wanted characters and stories you could grow with and learn, that felt consistent from one scene to the next. I saw a common trend on other apps where people would re-make bots with slight differences in the scenario, and I wanted to just give people the controls to do that. I was worried that this wouldn't really land, but so far most of the feedback has been positive.
What's changing?
However there were some things that stuck out to me, so with this update I've also pushed a major overhaul of the UI based on how people are actually using it: fewer menus, tabbed navigation, faster transitions. I've also removed the currency system, so instead of watching ads to earn credits to spend later, free users will just be promped to watch an ad every so often if they're chatting a lot in a short period of time.
But the bigest change is the addition of a third pillar to the platform, the Context Engine, which lets me tie lore and concepts in between stories. I've gone through and re-written the setting for every story, tying them together in one shared world, for example Welcome to Blackthorne and The Hunger are now both set in the sleepy gothic town of Ash Hollow, and what you learn in one story could help you unravel something in the other. This also ties into a persistent memory system for your companions, which should be much more contextually aware of where they are and what's going on in the world.
What's next
I'm going all-in on the connected storytelling, where every story contributes to something bigger. I'll break down how it all works in a future blog, as well as the new Roadmap.
Want to check it out? Download Myrlo and then hop into the new Discord server to let me know what you think.