Quickstart

Patter has two halves: you write in Patterpad, and you play what you write with a Patterplay runtime. Here is the path from zero to a story running in your game. New to the ideas? Skim Core concepts or how it fits together.

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 the installer for your platform from the Download page:

• macOS: a signed .dmg
• Windows: an .exe installer
• Linux: an .AppImage

It’s a self-contained app; nothing else to install.

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: choose your runtime

A .patterc bundle plays the same way on every Patterplay runtime, so a story behaves identically whatever engine picks it up. Pick the one for your engine:

• Web / JavaScript / TypeScript: the quickest path is the self-contained patterplay.min.js drop-in: one <script> tag, no build step (download it or load it from a CDN). → JavaScript & web
• Unity (C#) · Unreal (C++) · Godot (GDScript): native plugins with the same API. → Playing in your game

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: handy for automation and CI. Download a standalone executable for your platform from the Download page.