Playtesting your story

Patterpad can run your story, not just show it. The Play window walks the real runtime, the same engine your game will use, so you can take the choices, watch the branches, and hear how a scene lands before anyone else sees it.

Starting a playthrough

• Play ▸ Play Scene (⌘P) opens the play window and starts from the scene you’re editing.
• Play ▸ Play from Start (⇧⌘P) runs from the project’s start point instead (you’ll be asked to set one the first time).
• To start partway in, right-click a block and choose ▶ Play block.

The window is always on top, so it floats over the editor while you work.

The Play window walks the real runtime. The header shows where the run started, plus speed, closed-caption, audio, and pin controls; played beats build up as a transcript, and eligible choices appear as buttons in the tray at the foot.

The controls

• ▸ Step plays one beat, a line, a piece of narration, or a game event.
• Auto-continue (the ▸▸ Continue toggle in the header, on by default) turns Step into Continue to next stop: it plays on to the next choice or the end, revealing one line at a time. ◼ Stop pauses the reveal, and Step/Continue picks it back up. Turn it off to step one beat at a time.
• Speed (Slow / Normal / Fast / Instant) sets how long each line is held before the next appears; Instant drops the wait entirely. It paces the reveal only, a voiced line always plays its full clip.
• Options you can take are buttons; ones whose condition isn’t met are shown faded and can’t be clicked. Pick one and the story moves on.
• ↺ Rewind (top-left) starts the run again from the top at any time; ↺ Restart shows up at the end.
• CC shows or hides the non-spoken caption cues (on by default). In an Audio Folders project an Audio toggle also appears, turning Continue into a table-read that plays each line’s recording.

The editor follows along

As it plays, the editor keeps pace: the current line gets a gliding marker and a soft wash, everything it’s already played picks up a faint “visited” dot, and the editor changes scenes when the story does. The speaker colours match the ones you see while writing.

Edit the scene mid-run and the change applies live: a reworded line plays its new text the next time it comes up, and even structural edits carry the run across (the playthrough keeps its place; a quiet “Edits applied live” note confirms it). Only an edit that doesn’t compile yet, say a half-finished line of logic, pauses the controls with a “Scene changed: restart” note until you restart or finish the edit.

Playing in another language

If your project has more than one language, the play window gains a language switcher; changing it replays the story in that language (lines that aren’t translated yet show as <Untranslated>). This is the one place Patterpad renders anything but your source language. See Localisation.

Playtesting inside your actual game

The Play window runs the story; sooner or later you want to feel a line inside the real game, with its voices, pacing, and presentation. You can have the same live-edit loop there too: run the game on your machine, and saving in Patterpad pushes your edit straight into the running game, no rebuild, no restart, no losing your place. Reword a line, save, and the game speaks the new words the next time it comes up; the editor also follows the game’s cursor, highlighting the line being played.

This needs a one-time hookup on the game side (the live refresh & debug link), so ask your developer to wire it in; it’s a few lines, described in Live refresh & debug. Once it’s in, writers just save.

Testing every path, not just the one you took

Playing walks one route at a time. To check that every line is reachable, and to catch choices that can silently run dry, use the Coverage Test (Review ▸ Run Coverage Test). See Coverage testing.