Choices and logic

This page is about how a Patter scene decides: which children of a group play, what the player picks from, and the conditions, effects, and properties behind it all.

Selectors

A group’s selector decides what happens with the children whose conditions pass.

run is the default. It plays every eligible child in order.

branch plays the first eligible child and stops. This is your if / else-if / else, and your switch. Order the children with conditions, most specific first, and leave an unconditional last child as the “else”.

sequence is a picker that remembers where it is, with two independent settings. Its order is sequential (the default), shuffle, or specificity (Best match, below). Its exhaust is once (the default), repeat, or stick, which holds on the last child. Shuffle deals from the pack without repeats, and never plays the same line twice in a row, and that’s built in rather than an option. The sequential and shuffle combinations cover the usual “each line once”, “cycle”, “random with no repeats”, and “stop on the last” patterns. specificity is the state-aware one, and gets its own section.

choice offers all children as options and waits for the player. It’s the one selector that does not filter on conditions; it hands ineligible options to your game marked unavailable instead (see below).

A sequence’s memory can be shared across flows rather than kept per-flow, so two characters never draw the same shuffled line, or a once is spent for everyone the first time it runs.

Best match: lines that fit the moment

sequence with order specificity (shown as Best match in Patterpad) is the selector for lines that should comment on the exact situation, and quietly fall back to something generic when nothing more specific applies. In one sentence: among the children whose conditions currently pass, play the one whose condition is the most specific to the present state; reach for a generic filler only when nothing more specific is eligible.

What it’s for

Reactive one-liners (barks, ambient chatter, greetings) that feel canned if they ignore the state, and are laborious to hand-branch if you write an if for every combination:

• Companion banter reacts to what just happened, with “You’re bleeding, here, take this” when the player is hurt and the companion has a potion, “Careful, it’s slippery” when it’s raining, and a plain “Keep moving” when nothing special is going on.
• A guard notices what you carry, with a line for the stolen crown, a line for any drawn weapon, and a generic “Move along” for everyone else.
• A shopkeeper’s greeting tracks your reputation or quest stage, and the further along you are, the more specific the line they have for you.
• Tiered filler gives three lines for the exact circumstance, two for the broad one, and one catch-all.

You write the specific lines and the filler, each with its condition, in one group; Best match picks the right tier every time, with no hand-built decision tree.

How it decides (the specificity score)

Each eligible child gets a specificity score: roughly, how many separate conditions are actively holding it true right now. The highest score wins. A child with no condition scores zero, so it is the filler; it only wins when nothing more specific is eligible. When children tie, Best match breaks the tie with the same seeded shuffle as shuffle, so it stays reproducible and never repeats a line back-to-back.

Walking a condition to score it:

• and adds its two sides (both must hold, so both count).
• or takes the stronger side (only one side is carrying the truth).
• not flips the sense and looks inside.
• check_flags(@q, +a, +b) counts each flag it checks.
• anything else (a comparison, a property, a visits() check) counts as one.

Condition (all currently true)	Score
(no condition)	0
@hurt	1
@hurt and @hasPotion	2
check_flags(@quest, +metCaptain, +hasCrown, +nightfall)	3
@rich or @generous	1

So a group holding @hurt and @hasPotion (2), @hurt (1), and a no-condition filler (0) plays the first line when the player is hurt and the companion has a potion; the second when hurt but empty-handed; and the filler otherwise.

Repeating vs using lines up

Best match composes with the sequence exhaust setting.

repeat is Patterpad’s default for Best match. It re-scores and re-picks every time the group is reached, so the character keeps preferring the most on-topic line as the state changes. This is what you want for barks and ambient chatter.

With once, each line is used up as it plays, so the group slides down the tiers, the most specific first, then the next, and finally the filler. That’s graceful degradation for a set of first-time lines that shouldn’t repeat.

Writing one

Put the specific lines first and the general ones last, each with its condition, and leave one child with no condition as the filler at the end. You don’t have to make the conditions mutually exclusive, and that’s the point. Overlapping conditions are fine, the most specific eligible one wins, and the filler catches the rest. (A Best-match group with no conditions at all just behaves like shuffle; Patterpad points that out.)

Every engine agrees

The score is a pure function of the condition and the current state, and ties use the shared seeded shuffle, so a Best-match group plays identically on all four runtimes (JavaScript, Unity, Unreal, Godot), the same as every other selector. It is locked by the conformance corpus.

Choices and options

Under a choice, each child is an option: a container with a required prompt, an optional condition and Game Data, a few flags, and the content that plays when the player takes it (anything from a single line to a whole subtree).

The prompt is exactly one beat (a line or text), handed to your game as-is. Patter doesn’t look ahead or guess: the prompt is the choice text, full stop. An empty prompt is allowed, so your game can draw the option from Game Data or an icon instead.

The flags

• secretUntilEligible (default false). While its condition fails, the option is kept out of the data your game receives entirely, so it can’t leak through a save. This is about secrecy, not rendering.
• sticky (default false). Off means once-only: after the player takes it, it is gone from the choice for good. On means it stays available as long as its condition passes. (This rides the option’s visit count, so it survives save and restore for free.)
• fallback (default false, at most one per choice). Never offered as a normal option; taken automatically the moment it’s the only eligible option left.

Unavailable, not hidden

By default an ineligible option is still returned to your game, with its text and an eligible: false flag (plus the reason it failed). How to present it is entirely your game’s call: dim it, show a lock, spell out the requirement, or leave it out. For example, a persuade option gated on @charisma >= 6 can be shown to a low-charisma player as “[Charisma 6] Talk them down”, so they see the path they could have taken; the runtime won’t let them pick it. Reach for secretUntilEligible only when an option has to stay truly invisible, so it can’t even leak through a save.

If no normal option survives and there’s no eligible fallback, the choice gathers: the flow carries on past it. A re-enterable choice with no sticky option and no fallback gets a choice-can-empty warning from the validator.

Conditions and effects

Conditions decide whether a snippet or group (or a conditional jump) is eligible. Leave one off and it’s always eligible.

Effects are ordered lists that run at a snippet’s seam, onEnter / onExit on a snippet and onEntry on a scene. An effect does one thing and one thing only, which is to set a property to the result of an expression. There’s no way to fire an event from an effect, so host events ride on Game Data instead.

Properties

Properties are the game state your logic reads and writes, and the state a runtime hands to the host.

There are two scopes. @patter is global, created at the start, alive forever, and visible everywhere. @scene is local to one scene, but still kept for the life of the piece. A bare @name means @patter.name, and there’s no block- or group-local scope.

The types are boolean, number, string, enum, flags (enum and flags behave like Ink LISTs), and quality, a story stage as an ordered ladder. Which to reach for, and how to tell the confusable pairs apart, is Property types.

A per-property shared flag controls where the value lives, either one value for the whole world or one per concurrent flow. @patter is shared by default and @scene is per-flow by default. The two are independent, so you can have a flow-private global or a shared scene property.

A per-flow @scene property marked temporary is reset to its default every time the scene is entered (“fresh each visit”, Ink’s temp).

Visit counts are derived and read-only. visits(node) / seen(node) give this flow’s entered-count for a node id; patter_visits() / patter_seen() give the count across the whole world. A node counts as “entered” when its condition passes and it’s selected.

The expression language

Conditions, effects, and value expressions are written in a small, type-aware expression language. A writer in Patterpad never types this by hand: the visual expression editor builds it from pills (a property, a comparison, a value) and stores the result. The language below is what that editor produces and what the format keeps on disk, useful to know if you’re reading files or building tooling, not something an author has to learn.

A property reference is written @name, @patter.name, or @scene.name. The operators are comparisons, boolean logic (&&, ||, !), and arithmetic, over numbers, booleans, strings, and string arrays (flags).

The built-in functions are seen() and visits() (and their world-wide patter_ forms), random(a, b) for a whole number from a to b inclusive, drawn from a seeded generator so every engine gets the same result, the flag helpers check_flags(@prop, +x, -y) and set_flags(...), and advance(@quality), which steps a quality to its next stage.

Embedding property values in text

You can drop a live game value straight into a beat’s text by wrapping a property reference in braces (sometimes called interpolation). At runtime the braces are replaced with the property’s current value:

You have {@gold} gold. → You have 42 gold.

• The body is a bare property reference, the same @ reference you’d use in a condition: a project property {@gold}, a scene property {@scene.threat}, a host value {@world.faction}. It’s a reference, not a formula: you can’t write {@gold + 1}.
• Only a {…} whose body starts with @ is a slot. To print a literal brace, double it: {{ shows as {.
• Values render as you’d expect: a number or string as-is, a true/false property as true / false, a flags set as a comma-separated list. An unset property shows as nothing. A {@…} naming a property you haven’t declared is flagged as an error.

Where it works: the voiced-project wrinkle

Text	Embedding a value
Narration (text beats)	always
Choice options	always
Dialogue (line beats)	only when the project is not voiced

Narration and choice options are always on-screen, so a value can always be substituted in.

Dialogue is the exception, and it comes down to whether the project is Voiced. A voiced line ships as recorded audio, and you can’t splice a runtime value into a fixed recording, so a voiced project rejects a {…} slot in a dialogue line, as a build error. If the project is not voiced, its dialogue is just on-screen text like narration, so embedding works there too.

In short, narration and choices always; spoken lines only when there’s no voice audio to contradict them. If you switch a project to Voiced later, any {…} already sitting in a dialogue line will surface as a build error to clean up.