Your first ten minutes

You will open a small example, change it, and see your change play.

1. Open the example

1. Start the author player.
2. When it asks for a project, pick examples/example-01-hello-vn.
3. Click through a few lines. Space, a mouse click, or the Continue button moves on.

2. Open the script

Open examples/example-01-hello-vn/story/script.txt in any text editor. You will recognise what you just saw:

[bg street fade 0.5]
Hello! This is the smallest story you can run.

[hana left fade 0.45]
HANA:
Hi - I'm Hana.

• A line in square brackets is a stage direction: show the street, bring Hana in on the left.
• HANA: means Hana speaks the lines below it.
• A line with no speaker is the narrator.
• An empty line starts the next moment of the story.

3. Change something

Change Hana’s line:

HANA:
Hi! I rewrote this line myself.

Save the file, go back to the player, press F5. Hana now says your line.

Other keys you will use (F2, F6, F12): How you work.

4. Add a moment

Add these lines at the end of the file, after an empty line:

[bg parknchairs fade 0.5]
[hana left fade 0.4]
HANA [closed]:
The park is quieter than I thought.

Press F5 and click through to the end. You changed the place, brought Hana back, and gave her a different expression (closed uses the picture hana_closed.png).

Those pictures live under characters/ and backgrounds/ — Pictures, sound, and folders.

5. Break something on purpose

Change parknchairs to parkchairs (a typo), save, press F5, then press F12 and open Validation. The missing background is listed. Fix the typo and reload.

That is the whole loop: write, reload, check.

Where next

If settings files are new to you: What is JSON and Reusing settings. What those [bg] / [hana] lines load from disk: Pictures, sound, and folders.

Continue with What a script is. The rest of the examples in examples/ add one idea each: