World Graph

World Graph is the editor mode you author the spatial layer of your story in. The workspace where scenes and locations sit together takes most of the screen; the Sidebar on the left lists them. Use it to see how the project’s scenes and locations connect, draw new Connections between them, and add new locations as the project grows.

What’s not here: how scenes work conceptually lives in Scenes and visit state, what a location’s lifecycle events do at runtime is in Locations, and the World Layer workflow as a whole is in World layer. For why a Connection has a particular color, see the legend below.

Navigate the graph

World Graph showing scenes and locations together. A swatch legend in the corner names the four kinds of Connection by color.

Sidebar: lists every scene and every location in the project, in two sections. Single-click a row to focus the graph on that entity.
Layer toggle: the Scenes and Locations buttons in the top-right. Each toggle is independent. Switching one off hides those entities from the graph and dims the matching Sidebar section.
Scene: a scene card. Scenes are containers for the nodes a writer authors; drilling into one opens its Node Graph.
Location: a location card. Locations are places in the world the player can be at; their Inspector shows Enter Events, Exit Events, and pinned Encounters.

Pan the graph by dragging an empty area, or hold space and drag from anywhere. Zoom in and out with the trackpad pinch, the mouse wheel, or ⌘+ and ⌘− to step. F fits the visible world to the viewport.

What Connections mean

The Connection lines on the graph are derived from the underlying data. You don’t author a line directly; you author the event, encounter, or adjacency it represents, and the line follows.

Adjacent Connection is a direct location-to-location route the runtime can traverse without firing an event. What that means in your project is up to you; it might be that the player can walk between the two locations, or that one is a neighborhood of the other.

Start Scene lines run a scene as the result of something the player did. The same color covers two cases: a scene event that starts another scene, and a location’s Enter Events or Exit Events that start a scene when the player arrives at or leaves that location.

Move To Location lines move the player from one location to another. Same color in both directions: a Move To event on a scene that drops the player at a location, and a location-to-location route written as a Move To event on the source location.

Encounter lines stage a scene at a location. The scene becomes a clickable affordance in the world when the player is at that location and the scene’s Trigger allows it. The staging workflow, trigger kinds included, lives on Encounters.

Lines have direction. Adjacent Connections that go both ways draw as a single bidirectional line. Other kinds always show the source-to-target direction.

Draw a Connection

A drag from one location to another, with the disambiguation menu open offering three Connection types.

Source: the location you dragged from.
Target: the location you dragged to.
Disambiguation menu: lists the Connection kinds creatable between this source and target. Pick one to author it.

Drag from one card to another card to open this menu. The options change based on what you connected to what; the editor only ever offers Connection kinds that make sense for the pair.

Location to location (the worked example above) offers three: Move To Location (on Enter) and Move To Location (on Exit) both attach a Move To event to the source’s lifecycle, firing when the player enters or leaves it; Adjacent Connection writes a passive route, no event.
Location to scene offers three: Start Scene (on Enter) and Start Scene (on Exit) attach a Start Scene event to the source location’s lifecycle; Add as Encounter at this Location pins the scene as an Encounter on the source.
Scene to location offers one: Move To Location (new node), which creates a new node in the source scene with a Move To event.
Scene to scene offers one: Start Scene (new node), which creates a new node in the source scene with a Start Scene event.

Inspect, edit, and delete

Right-click a location or scene card to open its context menu. A location offers Open inspector (drill into the location’s fields, including Enter Events, Exit Events, and pinned Encounters) and Delete. A scene offers Open inspector, Open Node Graph (drill into the scene’s nodes), and Delete.

Connections have their own right-click menu: Focus on source and Focus on target center the graph on either endpoint; Delete connection removes it. When a Connection aggregates more than one underlying event or adjacency (drawn as a single line on the graph), Delete is disabled; open the source entity’s Inspector and remove the specific event, encounter, or adjacency there.

For a multi-card selection (scenes, locations, or a mix), drag a Selection box across the cards you want. Right-clicking any one of them switches the menu to a bulk Delete N entities action. The Selection box and bulk-menu pattern are the same as in the Node Graph.

Add a location

The empty-area context menu open over a clear pocket of the World Graph.

Right-click any empty patch of the graph to open this menu. Add Location Here creates a new Location at the click position; Add Scene Here creates a new Scene the same way. Auto-arrange runs against the whole World Graph, not a single scene; Fit to view zooms the graph to the full layout.

Work with scenes

Scenes appear in two places in this mode: in the Sidebar’s Scenes section, and as cards on the graph alongside locations.

The Sidebar’s Scenes section is the same tree you use in Node Graph: collapse and expand, filter, drag-to-reorder, drag-to-reparent. Card-level actions (drag-to-create, right-click) are covered in Draw a Connection and Inspect, edit, and delete.

Two things specific to scene cards:

Drag-to-create skips the menu. Scene-to-scene and scene-to-location have only one Connection kind each (a new node in the source scene, with a Start Scene or Move To Location event), so the disambiguation menu shown earlier doesn’t appear; the new node is created the moment you release the drag.
Open Node Graph drills in. The right-click menu’s Open Node Graph jumps from a scene card straight into its Node Graph.