I Can Play There Studios
# 🎮 I Can Play There Studios
**One developer. One employee. A lot of stories that have been waiting their turn.**
I write games where the story matters — where the people in them have their own lives, their own agendas, and their own memory of how you've treated them.
## Every choice matters
I've played a lot of games that offered me choices and then quietly funnelled me toward the same ending anyway. That always felt like a broken promise.
So in my games, the branches go somewhere. Each major character has a story that unfolds only if you invest in them. You can build a romance, a friendship, or an enemy out of the same person — sometimes all three in a single playthrough. Push someone too hard and that door closes for good.
That's the whole design philosophy, and it comes from something true: real life is a chain of small choices whose consequences we mostly never see. My games just make the chain visible.
**Every choice matters, so pick the ones you want.**
## What you won't find here
**No erotic content.** My playtesters are my wife, my kids and my friends, so nothing ships that I'd be uncomfortable handing them. The games top out around PG-13.
There are kisses. There are intimate scenes. Nothing lewd — they're about two people being fully present with each other, and the rest is left to your imagination. I know that's not the default expectation in the visual novel space. It's a deliberate choice, not an oversight.
What you get instead is the part I actually care about: emotional weight, personal growth, and characters who feel like people.
## On AI — I use it, and I'll tell you exactly how
I use Claude Code to help build and wire up my games, and NovelAI to generate character and background art. I'd rather say that plainly than have you wonder.
What I don't do is let it write the stories. **The writing is 100% mine** — every character, every arc, every line of dialogue. I draft the story skeleton, the flowcharts and the project plan before a single line of code exists, and there isn't a page of code in my games I haven't read and iterated on myself.
I think of it as collaborating with an experienced developer, not as pressing a button. It's a force multiplier for one person with a day job, a family and a game with 18,000+ lines of code and 185+ art assets. Without it, these games would take decades.
If that's a dealbreaker for you, I understand, and I'd rather you know up front. There's a longer piece about it on my site if you want the full argument.
## In the works
- **🎵 The Soundtrack of My Life** — the flagship. A musician's life sim about trading your hours between a career and the people who love you. Five romance arcs, four friendships, permanent consequences.
- **⚡ Convergence: Zero** — a superhero story set after a Large Hadron Collider accident rewrites reality. Thirty days, six factions, and a cast whose masks come off only as they learn to trust you.
- **🐂 Westward** — a weekend project that got away from me: a modern rebuild of the trail game I grew up on, from the designer's original source.
- **💀 Try Not to Die** — a dungeon crawler named for exactly how it goes for you.
## Who's behind it
Dave Shields. I spent my teens and twenties running tabletop campaigns — BESM, SAW, Sphere — and writing far more world than my group ever had time to play. Those stories stayed in my head for years.
Day job: twenty-five years in enterprise identity and access management, plus a decade teaching graduate cybersecurity. Games are what I do with the hours that are left, which is why they take a while and why I won't ship one before it's ready.
📍 Kansas City, MO
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*Follow along at [icanplaythere.com](https://icanplaythere.com)*
