Kreyling has always fit between the lines.

In 2010, he moved from Maryland to New York City to take the job at Muse Games. It was his first job in the industry. While his background was in programming, he found himself doing a lot more than that.

"I would just come in and just fix stuff," Kreyling says. "Like whatever needed to get done."

This was especially true when it came to the development of Guns of Icarus Online, the game that eventually led him to the disaster area. One week the user interface would need improvement and redesign; then another server administration would need better tools; then another voice chat would need to be integrated.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon at a small studio, but Kreyling took on so much that his friends and roommates became increasingly concerned with his work habits — and with the toll they were taking on him.

"[H]e was pretty stressed out," says Ananth Panagariya, one of Kreyling's roommates at the time. "He was juggling a whole bunch of things at the same time ... And one of the things was that he was the guy on call if Guns of Icarus ever got brought down."

To keep his sanity, Kreyling took on small programming projects on the side. Things that mattered to him, and had nothing to do with the day-to-day grind at Muse. And following Hurricane Sandy, he focused in on one in particular: a game engine for visual novels.

Kreyling was creating an interface for narrative-focused video games — games with static characters over static backgrounds that often give players dialogue choices. Fans love the genre because it lets them play roles in these stories and affect the outcomes — a Choose Your Own Adventure for the modern era, often filled with more nuanced characters than other game stories.

Kreyling became interested in the genre after a friend recommended he play writer and developer Christine Love's don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story. In it, players take the role of a high school teacher in a near-future Canada where — unknown to the students — the teachers are able to read the private messages students send to each other. The game's story ends up addressing issues of privacy, sexuality and relationships that exist both online and in the real world.

"I played that game and I fell in love," Kreyling says. "I was bowled [over]. I love everything [Christine Love] does, but for whatever reason that one hit me really hard and stuck with me. So I decided I wanted to make a visual novel."

He wanted his to not only be playable on a computer, but also easy to port to iOS and Android. But he couldn't find an engine that fit the bill. He also couldn't find a visual novel engine that would run in a web browser, which he would likely need for the game he wanted to make.

Kreyling knew what he wanted his first visual novel to be, an adaptation of a friend's webcomic called Starfighter. The comic was sexually explicit, so he knew that trying to sell it on any well known digital game store would be difficult if not impossible.

"You can't take that to the [iOS] App Store," Kreyling says. "You can't take ... I don't even know if you could take that to Google Play. I don't know if you could take that to Steam. Right, so we looked at Starfighter and we looked at this really sexually explicit property and I kind of threw up my hands and was like, 'Well we could ship it binary or we can make people go to a website.'"

Rather than limit the reach of Starfighter as a visual novel, Kreyling decided to break down the wall himself. He wanted the game to run in a browser so it would be easier to sell, but there was no off-the-shelf solution. What he envisioned had never been done before. So he decided to do it himself.

In his spare time, he dug in on the project, a visual novel engine that would run in a browser. He called it htmlVN.