Storylet Studio

The Standalone Player

The Standalone Player is a self-contained HTML file you build from the Publish pane and hand to a playtester. They can try your storyworld without Storylet Studio installed, without an account, and without any game engine. They open the file in any browser and they're playing.

It's a handy helper, not the published runtime artefact: a game shipping a storyworld in production goes through a StoryletEngine plugin instead. The Standalone Player is built for handing round to playtesters.

If you're the author testing your own work in progress, the Simulate view inside the editor is the everyday tool for that. The Standalone Player is what you produce when you want other people to try your storyworld.

Build one

  1. Open your storyworld and go to the Publish tab.
  2. Under Standalone Player, click Download Player ZIP.
  3. Save the ZIP somewhere you can find it.

The ZIP contains an index.html plus any background images your storymap uses, with your current storyworld bundle embedded. Nothing in the file phones home; nothing needs an internet connection.

A note on size: background images embed at their full source size, so a storyworld with several large backgrounds makes for a larger ZIP. That's by design - the player has to be self-contained.

Give it to someone

Send the zip. The recipient extracts it and opens index.html in any browser - Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge. No install. No sign-in. No backend. The storyworld runs entirely in the browser tab.

The player saves progress automatically to the browser's local storage, and it survives a page refresh. Recipients can hit the Reset button in the player to start over, or clear local storage for the page.

What the player UI looks like

The Standalone Player runs the same single-player runtime and the same UI as Storymap > Simulate inside the authoring tool. The controls, the storylet cards, the navigation, the Log button - everything works the same. See Simulate for the full rundown of controls and the action log.

The only differences are environmental:

  • The Standalone Player has no editor or storyworld switcher around it. It's just the play surface.
  • State is per-browser, per-file: open the same index.html on a different machine or in a different browser and you start fresh.
  • There's no save-state snapshot system (that lives in Simulate, for the author).

Single-player storyworlds only

The Standalone Player runs the single-player engine, so it plays single-player storyworlds only. You can't play a multiplayer storyworld here: a shared session means real players joining over a network with durable per-player and installation state held centrally, which is what the StoryletEngine Server provides, not a single self-contained HTML file. To test a multiplayer storyworld before it goes live, use the multiplayer mode of Simulate inside the editor instead.