🏗️ Building Your World
Every Quill and Stein adventure is built from three simple building blocks:
- 👥 Entities — The people, objects, and things players interact with.
- 🎬 Scenes — The locations where your adventure takes place.
- 📂 Chapters — The larger sections that organize your story.
Think of it like making a movie:
- 🎭 Entities are the actors and props.
- 🎥 Scenes are the movie sets.
- 📚 Chapters are the acts that tell the larger story.
👥 Entities
Almost everything your player can interact with is an Entity.
Characters, keys, treasure chests, doors, books, switches, monsters.
Every entity has its own collection of properties that define how it behaves, including:
- 📝 Descriptions
- 🎭 States
- ⚡ Actions
- 🎬 Events
- 🖼️ Optional images
Entities can also:
- 📦 Contain other entities
- 🚶 Move between scenes
- 👀 Appear or disappear
- 🔄 Change descriptions over time
- 🤝 React differently based on what the player has done
The more personality and behavior you give your entities, the more alive your world will feel.
Instead of creating "Bird #3," create a grumpy raven that steals shiny objects and insults the player. Those are the moments players remember.
🌟 Builder Tip: Every important entity is a chance to surprise your players. Give them quirks, secrets, or unexpected reactions.
✨ Add Item/Character
Enter the basic information for your new item or character.
🏷️ Display Name
Enter the name that will be shown to players throughout your story.
You'll also need to select a determiner so the name is displayed correctly in descriptions.
🎭 Entity Type
Select the type of item or character you're creating.
Choosing a type automatically adds a set of starter states and actions, giving your entity the basic behavior expected for that kind of object or character.
📍 Location (Optional)
Choose where your new item or character begins the story.
An entity can start in, on, under, next to, outside, or in relation to almost any other entity in your world.
🧭 Location Preposition
Select the preposition that best describes the entity's starting location.
📝 An example sentence is displayed so you can see exactly how the entity's location will appear in the story.
✨ Import Entity
Sometimes you'll want to reuse the same items and characters in more than one scene. Instead of creating them again, you can simply import an existing entity into your current scene.
📦 Importing entities saves time, keeps your adventure organized, and makes it easy to reuse common objects and characters throughout your story.
Once an entity has been imported, you can make any changes needed for its new location.
💡 Builder Tip: Import entities whenever you need to reuse an item or character. It's much faster than creating a new one from scratch and helps keep your world consistent.
🎬 Scenes
Scenes are the places where your adventure happens.
A scene might be:
- 🏡 A room in a cozy cottage
- 🌲 A clearing in a mysterious forest
- 🏰 A dungeon in a haunted castle
- 🚀 A spaceship bridge
Each scene contains almost everything the player interacts with, including:
- 👥 Characters
- 📦 Items
- 🚪 Doors and portals
- 📝 Scene descriptions
- ⚡ Actions and Events
A great scene gives players something to do. Maybe there's someone to talk to, a mystery to investigate, or a puzzle waiting to be solved.
Small details can make a scene unforgettable.
Instead of simply describing a kitchen, maybe the soup is bubbling by itself... or the refrigerator keeps humming an eerie tune.
🎨 Builder Tip: Ask yourself, "What can the player discover or accomplish here?" If the answer is "not much," consider adding a character, puzzle, hidden object, or interesting interaction.
📋 Scene Details
Every scene has a name, description, image, and starting location for the player. Together, these create the player's first impression whenever they enter the scene.
🖼️ Scene Image and Description
Choose a default image and description for the scene. These are displayed whenever the player enters or returns to the scene.
As your story progresses, the scene's appearance and description can change by using State Descriptions, allowing the world to reflect the player's actions and the current state of the adventure.
In addition to the default image and description, you can create Action Messages that allow you to extend the opening into a series of images and text, helping you set the mood and introduce the scene.
🏷️ Scene Name and Determiner
To make the scene name read naturally throughout the story, select the appropriate determiner.
📝 A sample sentence is displayed beneath the scene name so you can see exactly how it will appear in your story.
📍 Player Location and Activity
Choose where the player begins within the scene and what they are doing when they arrive.
The player's activity helps the story describe the current situation more naturally, while the starting location determines where the player begins interacting with the entities in the scene.
💡 Builder Tip: A good scene introduction sets the mood, establishes where the player is, and hints at what they might discover next. Even a simple scene becomes more memorable when the description, image, and player activity work together.
🧭 Adjacent Scenes
Adjacent scenes are scenes that are directly connected to the current scene. They represent the places a player can travel to from their current location, such as the next room, a hallway, a garden, or any other connected area in your adventure.
Adjacent scenes automatically appear in the environment description, allowing players to move to them just as they would interact with any other part of the world. By connecting scenes together, you create the pathways players use to explore your story and discover new locations.
📂 Chapters
Chapters organize your adventure into manageable pieces.
Players usually won't even notice them, but you certainly will.
As your story grows, chapters make it much easier to navigate, edit, and expand without everything becoming one giant list.
You might create a new chapter whenever the player reaches a major milestone or enters a completely new area.
For example:
- 🏡 Chapter 1 — The Village
- 🌲 Chapter 2 — The Dark Forest
- 🏰 Chapter 3 — The Castle
Even if you're building a small adventure today, using chapters from the beginning makes future updates much easier.
📚 Builder Tip: Keep each chapter focused on one major part of your story. Future-you will be very grateful!
📄 Chapter Details
📂 Chapter Details define how each chapter is introduced to your players.
🏷️ Chapter Name
Give your chapter a descriptive name that reflects this part of your adventure.
🖼️ Chapter Image and Introduction
Choose an image and write an introduction for the chapter. This is displayed when the player enters the chapter and helps establish the setting, mood, or importance of what lies ahead.
🏷️ Show Title When Chapter Starts
By default, the chapter title is displayed when the chapter begins.
Set this option to NO if you want the chapter image to serve as the title or if you prefer a more cinematic introduction without displaying the chapter name.
🎬 Opening Messages
Opening Messages allow you to extend the chapter introduction with a series of images and text, creating a richer introduction before the player begins exploring.
💡 Builder Tip: Use your chapter introduction to signal that something important has changed. A new location, a new objective, or a change in mood helps players feel that they've entered the next stage of the adventure.
📖 Stories
A story is the home for your entire adventure. Everything you create belongs to a story, including its chapters, scenes, characters, items, portals, images, actions, and events.
Think of a story as a complete game. It defines where the player begins and contains every location they can visit throughout their journey.
Each story has a starting chapter and a starting scene. These tell the Builder where a new player should begin the adventure.
Stories can be as small as a single room with one puzzle or as large as a sprawling adventure spanning dozens of chapters and hundreds of scenes.