Publishing your story

Everything under the Publish menu turns your project into something you hand to others. Which one you reach for depends on who’s receiving it: the game gets the bundle, a person gets a playable page or a readable script.

Into the game: Publish Bundle

If your story is part of a game, this is the everyday one. Publish ▸ Publish Bundle (⇧⌘B) compiles the whole project into a single .patterc file - the thing the Patterplay runtime in your game actually loads - written to the Publish output path in your project settings, which you point once at your game’s assets folder. From then on, getting your latest changes into the game is one keystroke: publish, and the game picks up the new bundle on its next run.

It can be even tighter than that: with Live Link connected, saving in Patterpad pushes the fresh bundle straight into the running game - reword a line, save, and hear it in context without anyone restarting anything. The full detail of what’s in the bundle (and how localised strings travel) is in Building & shipping.

A playable page: one file, plays anywhere

Not on a game team, or not yet? You don’t need a game engine, a programmer, or a build pipeline to put your story in front of people. If all you have is Patterpad, you already have everything: write, press Play until it feels right, then publish one file and send it to anyone.

Publish ▸ Publish Playable HTML… writes a single .html file containing your whole story and the same engine a shipped game would use. It needs nothing else: no internet, no install, no server. Anyone you give it to double-clicks it and plays, on a laptop or a phone, with choices, memory, and branching working exactly as they did in your Play window. Players get a Restart, and their place is saved in that browser.

Ways to get it to people:

• Send it. Email it, drop it in a shared folder, attach it to a message. It’s one file.
• Put it on itch.io. Name the file index.html, zip it, and upload the zip as an HTML game. That’s the whole process - itch is the natural home for exactly this kind of work.
• Host it anywhere that serves files. Neocities, GitHub Pages, or any web space you already have: upload the file and share the link.

Details worth knowing: it plays in your source language, and it’s a text-first page (your game’s audio pipeline isn’t part of it). The full reference is in Building & shipping.

Make it yours: Publish for Web

The single file is perfect for sending, but its look is baked in. When you want a page you can customise and host, use Publish ▸ Publish for Web… and pick a folder. You get four small files:

index.html      the page - yours to edit
style.css       the look - yours to edit
story.js        your story - refreshed every publish
patterplay.js   the engine - refreshed every publish

The first two are the harness: published once, then left alone. Change the colours and fonts in style.css, add a title image or an author credit to index.html - then keep writing, and every later Publish for Web… to the same folder updates only your story, leaving your customisations exactly as you made them. (Deleted one? It’s re-created fresh on the next publish.) The folder plays straight from disk with a double-click on index.html, and uploads as-is to itch.io (zipped) or any static host.

A readable script: for people who’d rather read

Publish ▸ Publish Readable Script… writes the whole story as a screenplay-style PDF or Word document: scene headings, dialogue, narration, and the branching laid out plainly (choices as labelled lists, jumps as “go to …”). It’s the thing to hand an editor, a collaborator, or anyone giving notes on the writing rather than playing it. Details: Building & shipping.

The loop

Writing for a game, the everyday loop is:

1. Write (the writing surface).
2. Play it yourself, from any block, as often as you like (playtesting).
3. Publish ▸ Publish Bundle (⇧⌘B) - the game loads the new .patterc on its next run, or picks it up live if Live Link is connected.
4. Edit, publish again. The bundle is cheap to regenerate; your project on disk stays the single source of truth.

Publishing to people rather than to the game is the same loop with a different step 3: Publish Playable HTML… and send the file (or upload it and share the link) whenever you want playtesters or collaborators on the latest version - no engine involved. And if a story that started life as a sent-around page later becomes part of a game in Unity, Unreal, Godot, or the web, nothing is thrown away: the same project publishes the bundle those engines play.