Storylet Studio

Storylet Studio User Guide

Storylet Studio is a tool for authoring storyworlds: interactive, replayable narratives built from small reusable scenes called storylets. As an author you define a storyworld's geography (zones and sites), its state (properties), and its story beats (storylets), and Storylet Studio handles the rest: deciding which beat is appropriate at any moment, drawing from your decks, and applying outcomes back to the world state.

Web app and Desktop app

Storylet Studio ships in two forms:

  • Web app: Sign in with Google; your storyworlds live in your account's workspace in the cloud. Nothing to install.
  • Desktop app for macOS and Windows from download.storylet.studio. No login, no internet required after install. Each storyworld is a single .storyletstudio file you keep on your computer.

Both run the same authoring tool: the editor surface, the storymap, the storylet whiteboard, Explore mode, and Publish all behave the same way. Almost everything in this guide applies to both; where the two differ, we'll call it out inline.

You may currently have access to only one of them - the email allowlist for the web app and the desktop installers are rolled out separately during the tester phase. That's expected. You can move a storyworld between the two at any time as a .storyletstudio file - see Storyworld Import / Export.

Getting Started

If you are new to Storylet Studio, start here. You can be running the app and editing your first storyworld in a few minutes.

  • Getting Started - install or sign in, try the sample, build your first storyworld.

Core Concepts

Storyworlds are built from a small handful of concepts: acts, decks, storylets, sites, and the state that ties them together. These pages introduce them.

Working in the App

These topics apply to both the web app and the desktop app. Where a feature is web-only or desktop-only, the doc says so up front.

  • Simulate - playing through your draft live inside the editor. The everyday way to test as you build.
  • Storyworld Import / Export - moving a single storyworld in and out of the web app as a .storyletstudio archive (the desktop app already uses that format natively).

The Desktop App

What the desktop build adds on top of the shared authoring tool: local file model, offline use, auto-update, OS-level file association.

Game Data

  • Game Data - attaching custom fields to storylets so a player shell can consume them.

Sharing for testing

  • The Standalone Player - bundle a one-file HTML player from the Publish pane so a playtester can try your storyworld without Storylet Studio installed.

Engine Plugins

To ship a finished storyworld in a game, you publish it from Storylet Studio as a .storyworld bundle and load it through one of the StoryletEngine plugins for your game engine. The plugins are separate downloads from the authoring tool.