Write dialogue as a screenplay your game can play.
Patter is an open toolkit for dialogue and branching narrative in games. Writers work in Patterpad, a desktop editor that reads like a script. Your game plays the result through one small file, in Unity, Unreal, Godot, or on the web.
It’s free and MIT-licensed, and there’s no server to run.
A soft chime. A warm, paper-coloured room assembles itself around you.
Built for the people who write it
Patterpad is a desktop editor with a scene laid out the way a script is, in character cues, lines, and directions. There's no markup to learn and no node graph to untangle, so a writer is productive on the first morning.
Conditions and variables are edited in a side panel with a guided editor, which keeps the logic out of the prose. A play window walks the real story as you write, so you can pick choices and watch it branch without a compile step.
Review comments, draft status, translation, and voice-recording scripts are built in. Everything lives in plain files on disk that you own, in git or Perforce. Patter is free, MIT-licensed, and needs no server or account.
Plays in your engine the way it played in Patterpad
Patterpad plays your story on the same runtime your game will use, so what you test at the desk is what ships: the choices, the conditions, saving and loading, even the random draws. There’s a runtime for your engine, whether that’s Unity, Unreal, Godot, or the web, and it loads the one bundle Patterpad publishes.
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Unity
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Why teams reach for it
- Scenes are plain text in your own repository, so a team's edits merge by structure instead of colliding.
- Coverage testing walks the story thousands of times and flags every beat a player can never reach, and the CLI can fail a build on it.
- Every line has a permanent id, so a translation is that line in another language and an audio take is that line's recording.
- Localisation comes in two modes, with a live language switch and caption cues a player can turn off.
- A stakeholder gets one playable HTML file or a PDF screenplay, with nothing to install.
Download Patterpad
Patterpad is the authoring tool: the desktop editor your writers work in. It's self-contained, with nothing else to install. The runtime for your engine and the CLI are on the download page.
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