Items and events that open something to read, look at or listen to: books with pages, notes, scrolls, picture books, data pads and audio journals, with every part of the look under your control.
Books, Notes & Audio Journals
A book is anything a player reads, looks at or listens to. A leather tome with turning pages, a torn note, a royal scroll, a picture book, a data pad and a recorded journal are all books. Each one is its content plus a style, so you are never stuck with the look of a built-in format. Every starting look comes with its own art, sounds and fonts, ready to use or replace.
Books are off by default while the feature is new. Turn them on with the Books flag (see Feature Flags). Off: readable items do nothing and the Library is hidden.
Where to author it#
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Write a book and its look | Database → Books |
| A look shared by many books | Database → Books → Shared styles → New |
| Make an item open a book | Database → Items → the item → Basics → Readable |
| Open a book from a lectern, shelf or sign | The event editor → Open Book command |
| Require reading in a quest | The quest → Objectives → Read a Book |
| Translate a book | Localization, under the book group |
Set up your first book#
- Turn on the Books flag under World → Features.
- Open Database → Books.
- Pick a starting look from the list, such as Bound tome or Torn note, and press New.
- Give it a title on the right.
- On the Pages tab, write in the text box. The preview in the middle is the same reader players get.
- To bring in a long text, press Paste a manuscript. A blank line starts a new paragraph, a line starting with
#is a heading, and a line of three dashes starts a new page. - Press Save.
- Open Database → Items, pick or create an item, and under Basics → Readable choose your book.
- Publish, then use the item in game. Its button says Read, or whatever you typed in Button word.
Pages#
A book can mix two kinds of page.
| Page | What it does | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Text page | Holds blocks. The text wraps and splits across as many pages as the player's screen needs | Books, letters, lore |
| Picture page | Art and text placed by hand on a page of 800 by 1000 units, scaled to fit | Picture books, maps, comics |
Text pages hold these blocks:
| Block | What it does |
|---|---|
| Text | A paragraph. The toolbar sets bold, italic, underline, size and colour, and inserts the reader's name or a variable |
| Heading | A large, medium or small heading |
| Picture | An image with a width and a caption |
| Divider | A plain line, or your own ornament |
| Space | A gap of the height you set |
| New page | The text after it starts on a new page |
| Audio button | Plays one of the book's tracks |
| Link to a page | Jumps to another page, for contents pages and branching stories |
Picture pages hold Picture, Text, Animated sprite and Clickable area layers. Drag a layer to move it, and drag its blue corner to resize it. A text layer has its own font, size, colour and alignment. A clickable area can go to a page or play a track.
The look#
Open the Look tab, or edit a shared style. Everything you leave alone stays at its default.
| Group | Settings |
|---|---|
| Format and window | Open book, single page, scroll, loose sheet, slate or audio player. Size, binding, accent, how far the world dims, tilt, corner radius, window shadow, opening animation, background art and 9-slice frame art |
| Covers | Front cover, back cover and spine art |
| Page | Colour, paper art (stretched or tiled), all four margins and spine shadow |
| Page numbers | Where they sit (bottom, a corner, the outside corners, the top or none), plain or Roman numerals, your own wording such as Page {n}, size, colour and font |
| Text | Body and heading fonts, size, line height, paragraph spacing, first-line indent, letter spacing, heading size, ink colours, alignment, drop cap with its colour and size, a carved, shadowed or glowing text effect, and an instant or typewriter reveal |
| Picture captions | Size, alignment, colour and italics for the caption under a picture |
| Page turn | See below |
| Sounds | Open, close, and up to 16 page-turn sounds played at random |
| Buttons | Where they sit (under the book, over it, or Back and Next at its sides), how the row lines up, labels, colours, border, corners, font, width, height, your own button art, and the page count |
| Audio player buttons | Labels and art for play, pause, previous and next |
| Transcript | The audio player's transcript box and the subtitle line under a book read with its audio: box colour and corners, text colour, how faint the other lines are, the colour and highlight of the line being spoken, text size and font |
| Scroll rollers | Colour, height and art, on the scroll format |
A shared style applies to every book that names it. Change it once and they all follow. Anything you set on one book's Look tab applies to that book only.
A setting you changed shows ↺ Use shared style beside its name. Press it to drop just that setting, so the book follows the shared style again for it. On a shared style the same button says ↺ Default and puts the setting back to the engine's default.
In the page-number Wording, {n} is replaced by the number, so you can write Page {n}, – {n} – or the same in your own language.
EB Garamond, Cinzel, Caveat, Share Tech Mono and Inter are built in. Other fonts come from your Font Manager. A name that is in neither only works if the player has that font installed. The built-in fonts cover Latin letters, and other scripts fall back to the next font in the list.
A torn note's see-through edges come from its paper art. To cut your own, use an image with transparency, set Page colour to transparent and Window shadow to Follows cut-out art.
A book with a Front cover opens on it in the game: the player clicks the cover to open the book, and it counts as read from then on. The editor's preview skips the cover, so you always see the page you are writing.
Press ▶ Play as player on the preview to open the book over the whole editor as a player gets it: the cover, the dimmed world behind it, the sounds, the audio and Close. Press Close or Escape to come back. It shows the book as it was when you pressed the button, so close it and press it again after an edit.
Page turns#
| Turn | What the player sees |
|---|---|
| Curling page | The sheet lifts and bends over the spine, showing the next page on its back |
| Stiff page | The same turn with a rigid sheet, for card, metal or a heavy tome |
| Fade | The pages cross-fade |
| Slide | The new page slides in |
| Roll past | The new page rolls up from below |
| None | The page changes at once |
Set the Speed, Curl amount, Shading and Easing. With Players can drag the page by hand on, a curling or stiff page follows the player's finger or mouse, and a page dragged only partway falls back.
Your own animation plays a sprite sheet over the page and changes the page at the frame you choose, for a page burning away or a hologram glitch.
Players who turn on reduced motion get a quick fade instead. A curling page drops to a stiff one on a device that cannot keep up.
Audio journals#
- Press New with Audio journal chosen, or open the Audio tab of any book.
- Set How it is taken in to Listen, or Read and listen to show pages as well.
- Press Add a track and pick a recording. Add a title, a speaker and a portrait if you like.
- Add the transcript. Play the recording and press Line at the playhead at each new line, or paste the whole text and adjust the times.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start playing when opened | Plays without a press |
| Keep playing after the window closes | A small on-screen player stays up with a Stop button |
| Turn pages with the tracks | Each track can turn to its own page |
| Music level while playing | How far the music drops, from 0 (silent) to 1 (unchanged) |
Players control the volume with the Voice slider in their audio settings. A track can have a recording per language in the data model, set through the AI tools.
Hidden pages#
Under Who can see this page, add conditions: player level, skill level, passive, class, quest completed, switch or variable. All must pass. The game does not send a hidden page to the player at all, so it cannot be read early by inspecting game data. A track that only hidden pages play stays hidden too, and so does a track that turns to a hidden page. Reopening the book after the condition passes shows the page.
Use Show hidden pages above the preview to include or leave out these pages while you work.
Behaviour#
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| When a character first opens it | Runs a common event once per character, however many copies they find. Use it for skill XP, a quest, a switch or a recipe |
| When a character first reaches the end | The same, once they reach the last page. The book must have been open long enough to read: at least 1.5 seconds, plus time for each page, up to 20 seconds |
| Keep it in the player's Library | Read books collect under top bar → More → Library, and can be read again without the item |
| Reopen at the page they left | Picks up where the character stopped |
| Close the book when the player… | Takes a hit, enters combat, or is pushed, pulled or teleported. The world does not pause while a player reads |
On the item, Used up when read removes one copy each time it is read. A skill book or potion that is also readable opens its book and then does its usual job. A quest's start item shows its text and starts its quest.
Gotchas#
- Players cannot walk while a book is open. Clicks, arrow keys, a gamepad stick and touch controls do not move them until they close it. A walk under way stops when the book opens.
- Back and Next at the sides need room. On a screen too narrow for them, they go under the book.
- Publish to see it in game. Saving updates the preview. A live world picks up the change on the next publish or sync.
- A book needs a title and something to show. The editor refuses to save one with no pages and no audio.
- A link, hotspot or track to a missing page is an error. The list above the page editor names each one.
- Add transcripts. A track with no transcript shows a warning, because players who cannot hear it get nothing.
- Deleting a book makes the items that open it stop being readable, and removes it from Libraries. The editor names those items first.
- No raw HTML or CSS. Text and styles are checked, so creator content cannot run code on a player's machine.
- Long picture books count against one limit: about 1.5 MB of text and settings per book. Art and audio are stored separately and do not count. Split very long books into volumes.