Running the project

If you run the narrative effort, this is your map. Patter is not just a writing tool: it tracks how finished the script is, manages the voice-recording and localisation pipelines, catches dead or unreachable content before players do, and packages the whole story into something you can hand to a stakeholder, a translator, or a studio. The pages below are the ones you will live in; a writer or developer can ignore most of them.

Track how much writing is left

Every line carries a writing status on an ordered ladder (for example stub to final), with two readiness markers (“ready to record” and “ready to ship”). Patter rolls those up per scene and across the project, so “how much is drafted vs done, and what’s left” is a number, not a guess.

• Writers set the ladder up on the Writing status page; here it becomes the rollup and the reports.
• Burndown and estimating: stub scenes with a couple of placeholder lines would read as almost finished. Turn on Estimating to size them by a guess, so the “lines to write” burndown reflects the real work ahead and the schedule is honest. See Estimating.

Manage voice recording

The whole VO pipeline lives in the app:

• Assign actors to characters in the Cast.
• Export a recording script for the studio, either every voiced line or only those marked ready to record: Production reports and exports (or patter voice-export from the CLI).
• Track takes by dropping audio into per-status folders; Patter derives each line’s recording status from the files, and flags a take as out of date when the line is edited after it was recorded, so you know exactly what needs a re-take. See Recording status and audio.

Run localisation

Source strings never leave your hands. Export for translation (JSON, Excel, or PO), hand off, and import the translations back; stable ids mean moving or editing a line never orphans its translation.

• The round-trip, step by step: Languages & translation.
• The full picture (and the embedded-vs-IDs-only choice at build): Localisation.

Catch dead content before players do

The coverage test walks the flow many times with random choices and flags every beat it can never reach (dead) or can only reach with the right game state (needs input), and can auto-propose the inputs to exercise world-gated branches. It is narrative QA you can gate a build on.

• Coverage testing, or patter coverage (with --fail-on-gap for CI).

Review and sign off

• Threaded comments and suggested rewrites live on the nodes themselves, Word/Docs style, and a review walk steps you through the open ones. See Reviewing & feedback.
• The Production Information report (word and line counts, status bars, recording coverage, burndown) exports to .xlsx for anyone who wants it in a spreadsheet: Production reports and exports.

Hand it off and ship

You do not need a build to show the story to anyone:

• A single playable HTML file that plays the whole story offline in any browser: Playable HTML.
• A readable PDF or Word screenplay of the script and flow: Readable script.
• A .patterpack to hand the whole project to a freelancer outside your version control: Handing off without your VCS.

Keep the team from clobbering each other

A project is plain files in your version control (git, Perforce, Plastic, or SVN), and Patter is lock-aware, so a writing team’s edits merge instead of colliding. See Version control.