Concepts

Concept pages explain the ideas the tool is built on. Authoring pages teach which button to press; concept pages teach what happens next. Read them in order once and the rest of the manual reads easier.

Nodes and Visibility is the starting point. Everything you author lives on a node; the Visible when rule decides whether that node shows up as a choice. Once those two ideas click, most of the rest is consequences.

State covers the variables that Visible when rules read. Four types (bool, decimal, int, string), how they default, and how a change to one propagates to every condition that reads it without you thinking about it.

Scenes and visit state adds the second layer of gating. A scene groups nodes and activates them only when the scene is active. Visit state (Played, Selected, Seen) is scoped to the current visit of that scene.

Evaluation cycle is the sequence the runtime runs each time the player picks a choice: events fire, state changes, dirty nodes reevaluate, and the new visible set appears. Knowing what runs when is how you reason about why a choice did or didn’t surface.

Expressions is the shared language for every rule above. Anywhere the editor accepts a Visible when, a condition, or a computed value, you’re writing an expression. This page covers the grammar; the operators and functions reference lists round it out.

World layer is the optional second axis. Alongside the narrative stack (which scene is on top), a running project can track where the player is in a graph of locations. Read this last. Everything above works without it.