Getting started

Your first ten minutes with Patter are spent writing a scene. You open Patterpad, name a project, type a character’s cue and the line they say, add another, and press play. The scene runs in the Play window above the script, and from there the branches, the conditions, and the game are one step each. This page is that path, from an empty project to a story running in your engine.

If you would rather read the ideas first, skim Core concepts or how it fits together. PatterKit: A Branching Dialogue System introduces the project, where it came from, what is in it, and why it works this way.

Prefer to learn by playing?

The repo ships an interactive tour (examples/projects/tour.patter), a playable Patter story that walks you through choices, the three selectors, properties and conditions, closed captions, and the machinery underneath. Open it in Patterpad and Play from Start.

1. Get Patterpad

Patterpad is the editor, the desktop app where you write. Download it for your platform on macOS, Windows, or Linux. It’s one self-contained installer with nothing else needed, and the same page has the runtime plugins and the CLI.

2. Write your story

Create a project with File ▸ New Project… and start writing. The surface reads like a screenplay (character cues, lines, directions), and branching, conditions, and localisation are there when you reach for them. You can type dialogue immediately and play it live in the editor (⌘P / Ctrl+P) as you go.

The Patterpad guide is a full tour. The quickest starting points are the writing surface and structure & branching.

3. Build a bundle

When the story is ready for your game, Publish ▸ Publish Bundle (⇧⌘B) compiles the project to a single .patterc file with no dependencies. That one file is everything a runtime needs. (Updating the bundle can be automated.)

4. Play it in your engine

A .patterc bundle plays the same way on every Patterplay runtime, so a story behaves identically whatever engine picks it up. On the web, the quickest path is the self-contained patterplay.min.js drop-in, one <script> tag with no build step (download it or load it from a CDN), described on JavaScript & web. Unity (C#), Unreal (C++), and Godot (GDScript) each have a native plugin with the same API, and Playing in your game is where those start.

Each runtime loads the bundle and walks it beat by beat (line, narration, choice) while your game reads its own Game Data off each beat to drive audio, camera, quests, and everything else.

Prefer the terminal?

The patter CLI validates, compiles, tests, and even plays a project from the command line, which suits automation and CI. Download a standalone executable for your platform from the Download page.