Description
CLIFF – Interactive Micro-Drama Flutter App
CLIFF – Interactive Micro-Drama Flutter App is a complete interactive micro-drama platform: a Flutter application for iOS and Android, and a Node + PostgreSQL backend with an operator panel. They are developed against each other and ship together — the app is not a mockup and the backend is not a stub.
Ninety-second vertical episodes end on a cliffhanger. The screen cracks along a fault line and the viewer picks a side: EMBER, the risky path that usually costs coins, or TIDE, the safe one that is free. Each side leads somewhere different, so a series ends in two, four or more places — and the path they did not take can be opened later and watched.
The branching engine
Every competing short-drama item plays episodes in a straight line. In Cliff a series is a directed graph — an episode is a node, a branch option is an edge — and two rules follow from that, both enforced in the database rather than left to convention:
Unlocks are permanent. Paying for a branch buys the episode itself, which is what makes “the path you did not take can be opened later” true rather than marketing.
VIP grants no unlocks. Access is computed from the subscription being live, so cancelling puts the locks back. Otherwise one month of VIP would buy the whole catalogue permanently and nobody would ever renew.
The branch map screen draws the real graph — solid where the viewer has walked, dim where the story is still sealed — and counts how many endings they have reached out of how many exist. Endings are counted from the graph, never typed in, so the poster cannot claim a number the story does not have.
What the app does
Watching — Vertical video player with seeking and resume, progress saved per episode, a feed personalised from the tropes chosen during onboarding, search, series detail with an episode rail, library and continue-watching.
Choosing — The cliff moment with the fault-line split, the two-temperature EMBER/TIDE choice, real choice statistics that are withheld until enough people have chosen for a percentage to mean anything, and a branch map drawn from the live graph.
Store compliance — An age gate enforced by the router rather than a dismissible dialogue, data export on request, real account deletion with a recoverable grace period, push priming before the system dialogue, report and block with a moderation queue behind it, and subscription management from settings.
Demo mode — With no build flag the app runs against a built-in repository holding the same branching story the backend seeds. You can walk the entire loop, spend coins and reach an ending before standing up a database.
