Your first board

By the end of this you will have a board with a beginning, a line of dialogue, and a choice — and you will have played it. Nothing here needs a game engine, a plugin, or an installation.

You will need a project open. Everything below happens inside it.

1. Make a board

Press Ctrl+1, or click the first icon on the rail down the left edge. That is the Node Editor, and the panel that appears beside the rail is titled Boards.

Right-click anywhere in that panel and choose New Board. Give it a name — Opening will do — and press create.

Now double-click the board’s row. A single click opens a preview tab, which is replaced the moment you click something else; a double-click opens it for keeps. The empty canvas appears.

2. Put an Entry node on it

Right-click on the empty canvas. A radial menu opens with the node types this project has.

Choose Entry — where a conversation starts. It appears where you right-clicked.

An Entry node is not special-cased anywhere in TaleShard. It is a node type like any other, and the only thing that makes it an entry is that its type declares it cannot receive a connection. You can author a node type of your own with the same property and it will behave identically.

3. Add a line of dialogue

Drag from the port on the edge of the Entry node — the small handle that appears when you approach it — and drop the connection on empty canvas.

The radial menu opens again, and this time it creates the node and the edge in one action. Choose Dialogue.

Click the node’s empty text area — or, with the node selected, just start typing — and write a line. A field that already holds text opens on a double-click. Which fields a node has is decided by its node type, and you can change that later in the node builder.

Give the line a speaker

The band across the top of a Dialogue node is its Character, and it reads Select entity… until you pick one. A character is an entity, and an entity is made from an entity definition — so a project that has neither offers an empty list. Make them once:

1. Press Ctrl+4 for Entity Definitions. If the panel is empty, right-click in it, choose New Entity Definition, and name it Character.
2. Press Ctrl+3 for Entities, right-click, choose New Entity, and name it — Mira will do. With one definition in the project the entity is made from it; with several, you pick which.
3. Press Ctrl+1 to return to the board, click Select entity… on the Dialogue node, and choose Mira.

4. Give the story somewhere to go

Repeat the drag-and-drop twice more from the Dialogue node, choosing Dialogue each time, and write a line in each, so you have two nodes hanging off the first.

Now give the player the words to choose between. Double-click each of the two new edges and type the option — Ask about the lighthouse, Say nothing. That text is the edge’s label, and it is what the player picks.

An exit with text on it is an option a player picks; an exit with no text is a branch the story takes on its own. If you leave both edges unlabelled, Play still asks — it offers the lines the two nodes hold as the options — but a label lets the option say something other than the line it leads to.

Nothing else needs to be configured for this to work. If you want one of them to be conditional, that is the rules track — leave both open for now.

5. Tell the project where the game begins

Click the gear at the bottom of the rail — under Projects, not among the numbered icons. A Settings tab opens beside your board; inside it, open Game Start.

Choose your Entry node from the picker. It is labelled «board name» / «trigger code».

This is optional for playing in the browser, and it is what a game build reads. See project settings.

6. Play it

Click Play, the triangle in the bar above the canvas. It plays the board you have open, from its start, in a Play tab beside the board. Close on the last screen, or Close (Esc) on the player’s toolbar, closes the Play tab and takes you back to the canvas. Clicking the board’s tab also takes you back, and leaves Play open for later.

• Space or Enter advances, and interrupts a line that is still typing itself out.
• 1 to 9 take that numbered option.
• Backspace steps back.
• → steps forward again, replaying the decision you rolled back rather than asking it again.

The toolbar hides until you move the pointer to the top right. It carries Restart, Save this playthrough on this device, Load the saved playthrough, Fullscreen, and — for you as the author — a step counter and a Why this step? button that shows exactly why the story went the way it did.

That last one is worth pressing now while the story is simple, because it is the tool you will reach for when it stops being simple.

7. Change how it looks

Click the palette button on the player’s toolbar, Design this look. A Design tab opens beside Play, on the moment you were looking at.

A look decides how a moment is drawn: where the portrait sits, how the options are listed, what the palette is. Five come with the product — JRPG box, Subtitle + list, Big portrait, Side portrait, NVL page — and taking one gives you your own editable copy rather than a link to a shared original.

Play and Design are the same renderer over the same project. Nothing is a preview of something else.

What you just used

You did	The page for it
Made a board, joined nodes with edges	Boards and the canvas
Used Entry and Dialogue node types	The node builder
Made a character and gave a line its speaker	Entities and definitions
Labelled two edges into a choice	Boards and the canvas
Set the game’s entry node	Project settings
Played and rewound it	Play mode

Next

Two directions, and it does not matter which you take first.

Say what the story is about. Characters, items and locations are entities, shaped by definitions.

Make the second playthrough different from the first. That is variables, and the conditions you hang off an exit.

Or read where to go next, which lays out all six tracks.