How it fits together

Patter is a small family of tools around one idea. You author a story as plain files, compile it to one portable bundle, and play that bundle identically on any engine. This page shows how the pieces connect, so the rest of the docs make sense in context.

The dataflow

1. Writers author in Patterpad. The project is just a folder of plain-text files (scenes, strings, and their notes) that live in your version control alongside the rest of the game.
2. A build compiles the project to one .patterc bundle: It’s a single file and the only thing you ship. The patter CLI does this from the terminal (handy for automation), and Patterpad’s own Build menu runs the exact same compile.
3. A Patterplay runtime loads the bundle and plays it. There’s one for each engine (JavaScript, Unity, Unreal, Godot), and they all play a story the same way, so what your writers saw in Patterpad is what your players get.

Because Patterpad and the CLI share one engine underneath, what you write, what you automate, and what finally runs in your game never drift apart.

The components

Component	Who it’s for	What it’s
Patterpad	Writers and the project lead	The desktop editor, with a screenplay-style writing surface, live validation, an in-app play window, review and comments, status tracking, localisation, and all project settings.
The Patter format	Tooling authors and the curious	The on-disk project (text shards in your VCS) and the compiled .patterc bundle you ship.
Patterplay	Game developers	The runtime family, one native player per engine (JS, Unity, Unreal, Godot), each verified against the shared corpus.
The patter CLI	Developers and CI	The same operations the editor runs, from the terminal. Validate, format, compile, play, report, and export or import localisation.

All of these sit on one shared core (the model, the compiler, and a single operations layer), which is why they can’t drift, but you never have to think about those internals to use Patter.

Find your track

The docs are organised by what you’re trying to do. Writers live in Writing in Patterpad. The person who sets the project up for them reads Setting up a project, which covers properties, game data, cast, languages, version control, and building. Whoever runs the narrative effort has Running the project, on tracking progress, reviewing, and handing work to producers, translators, and voice actors. Game developers putting the story in a game start at Playing in your game, which has a guide for each engine plus the runtime API.

Everyone shares one vocabulary, the Core concepts primer.