Could a video game boost communication, decision-making skills in kids with autism?

That gray feline avatar — that’s Shadow Cat. He’s a virtual comic book character that an early-stage Cleveland startup is turning into a tool to improve cognitive training, performance data collection and research for autism spectrum disorders.

Tamar Medina and a pair of co-founders started J-LYNN Entertainment in 2011 to commercialize what they call video game comic books. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, the idea of the game is that the user controls a character in a video game that’s structured in frames, like a comic book. The player guides the character through a series of tasks and decisions, where each outcome or decision changes the next step of the game, and kids collect achievement points along the way.

Originally, the idea was to create the games as an educational and entertainment product. But when Medina and his partners began attending comic book conventions to test their audience, they were approached by parents and teachers who mentioned that the video game …