Your first story

This takes about ten minutes and ends with a story you can play: a traveller at a gate, two ways through it, and an ending. Along the way you will see where everything you make lands on disk, which is the thing worth understanding first.

You need the app installed — the download page has the installers, and Installing says what to click when your platform stops an app it does not know. If you would rather read a finished story first, New project → Templates makes you a copy of one; this page builds a small one from nothing, because where each thing lands is the point.

1. Make a project.

   Press New project on the home screen. Give it a title — The Gate will do — pick where the folder should go, and choose the language you are writing in. The language is offered from your computer’s settings, but it is your choice: it decides the name of the file every passage is written into.

   The app creates the folder and writes exactly one thing into it:

   • Directorythe_gate/

     • Directory.ripple/

       • project.json

   That is the project. There is no scaffold and no convention; everything else in the folder will be yours.

2. Make a board.

   In the file tree on the left, press + and choose Board. Name it gate. It opens on the canvas holding one node, Start, which is where the story begins — a board has exactly one.

   On disk you now have gate.graph.json. It is JSON, and you could open it in a text editor, though there is no reason to.

3. Write the first passage.

   Press the Narration button on the quickbar along the top of the board. A card lands on the canvas reading Empty — double-click to write, so double-click it.

   The Passage dialog asks for a title — At the gate — and which passage the card reads. Press New to make one, and write:

   The gate is shut, and the guard on the wall has seen you.

   Close the dialog. The writing is already saved: everything in the app writes as you work, and the dialog only decides the title and which passage the card points at.

   Beside the board there is now a folder the app shows as one file:

   • Directorythe_gate/

     • gate.graph.json
     • Directorygate-at-the-gate.loc.narr.bdl/

       • en-US.md
       • touch.json

   en-US.md — or whichever language you chose — is your sentence, as plain Markdown. A translation would be a second .md beside it. The folder is named after the board and the title, so passages sort beside the board they belong to.

4. Wire it in.

   Drag from the port on the right of Start to the port on the left of your passage. The story now has a first page.

5. Give the passage two choices.

   Drag from the passage’s first output port and let go over empty canvas. The Create menu opens where you dropped it, already wired to whatever you pick — choose Narration, double-click the new card, title it Talk to the guard, press New and write a line. Do it again from the passage’s second port (a spare appears beneath each one you wire) for Climb the wall.

   Now click each choice’s row on the first card. A choice has a name, which is what the card shows so you can find the branch on a wide board, and its words, which are what the reader is offered — in every language the story is written in. Give the first one Call up to the guard and the second Look for another way.

6. End it.

   Right-click on empty canvas, choose End, and wire both branches into it. An End accepts any number of wires, so every branch can finish at the same place — or add a second End and give the wall-climber a different fate.

7. Play it.

   Press the play button on the quickbar. The campaign window opens on your first passage with the two choices beneath it as tiles. Pick one, read the next passage, and reach the end.

   What you just played is exactly what an exported campaign plays: the same engine, with no preview copy that could disagree with it.

What you have

• Directorythe_gate/

  • Directory.ripple/

    • project.json
    • registry.json
    • workspace.json
  • gate.graph.json
  • Directorygate-at-the-gate.loc.narr.bdl/

    • en-US.md
    • touch.json
  • Directorygate-talk-to-the-guard.loc.narr.bdl/

    • en-US.md
    • touch.json
  • Directorygate-climb-the-wall.loc.narr.bdl/

    • en-US.md
    • touch.json

A board, three passages, and the app’s index in .ripple/. Every file is plain text, and the whole folder is a git repository waiting to happen — open the Changes tab beside Files and press the button to start keeping a history, if you like. It needs a name and an email address and nothing else.

Where to go next

• A second board. Make one, put a passage on it, and hand the story over with a Jump from the first board — then open Script navigation from the left panel’s footer to see the two boards drawn as a map.
• A dice roll. Right-click, pick Dice roller, type 1d20, and wire its total into a Comparator and an If to decide whether the climb works. The boards overview lists every node.
• A macro. Press +, choose Macro, and write a stretch of story between its Macro In and Macro Out — then drag the file onto your board and it runs there. Write a shop once and call it from every town.
• A second language. Project settings adds one; every passage gains an empty file for it, and the reader picks the language in the campaign window.