The TaleShard app

This is the manual for TaleShard itself — the editor you write in. It is a browser application; there is nothing to install and no plugin involved in any of it. If you are a programmer looking for the code that reads a finished project inside a game, that is a separate product with its own manual: the Unity plugin.

The shape of a project

Four things, and everything on these pages is one of them.

Boards are where the story is. A board is a canvas of nodes joined by exits, and a project has as many as you want — a board can sit inside another board, and a node on one board can jump to another.

Node types decide what a node is. They are not a fixed list we ship: a node type is a schema you author inside your own project, so a project about a courtroom drama and a project about a dungeon crawl do not have to pretend to be the same kind of story.

The world is what the story is about — characters, items, locations, factions. You declare a definition (the shape) and then create instances of it, and traits let two definitions share a block of fields without either one owning it. Lore documents and spreadsheets live here too.

The rules are what makes a second playthrough different from the first: variables, tags, the conditions on an exit, the scripts on a node, and the commands that tell a game to do something TaleShard cannot do itself.

Where to start

If you have never opened TaleShard, what TaleShard is is one screen and your first board is the one page worth doing rather than reading. The workspace names every part of the window, which is the page to come back to when something is called a thing you do not recognise.

If you are already inside the editor and want the section you are looking at, the sidebar is grouped the same way the activity bar is.