Product overview

The Last Lighthouse is a cinematic interactive story experience. Readers move through atmospheric chapters, make consequential choices and resume progress across devices, while an editorial studio keeps narrative content under deliberate control.

Key features

The live product ships these capabilities end to end.

  • Chaptered storytelling — a dedicated reader experience with endings, archive and about paths.
  • Cloud progress — authenticated story state and choice telemetry stay available between sessions.
  • Branching choices — each decision feeds readable outcome paths and editorial insight.
  • Editorial studio — content and chapter management for refining the narrative without redeploying the whole product.
  • Production delivery — Next.js frontend with a NestJS API, Prisma data model and Dockerised backend on Render; frontend on Netlify.

The user journey

Arrive on the atmospheric landing experience, enter the story, make chapter choices, continue through endings or the archive, and manage progress from an account when signed in.

Design analysis

The product leads with mood and clarity: cinematic environments establish the world, while the reader UI keeps choices and progress obvious. Our direction treats narrative content as a first-class system—chapters, lore and choice stats—so the experience can grow without losing coherence.

Architecture & delivery

Built as a full-stack TypeScript product: Next.js App Router on the client, NestJS and Prisma with Postgres on the API, Redux for reader progress, JWT authentication, CORS-aware origins and a Docker image that packages the API for Render. Netlify hosts the frontend with environment-driven API URLs.

Stack highlights

Core strengths demonstrated in this build:

  • Interactive storytelling UX
  • Branching narrative systems
  • NestJS + Prisma APIs
  • Docker and Netlify delivery