Where to go next

You have made a board and played it. Everything after this point is optional and can be read in any order — but the tracks below are not equally urgent, and which one is urgent depends on what you are doing.

If the story is getting big

Boards and the canvas is the page for organising it: boards inside boards, the Board node and the Jump node, groups, and the whole table of gestures and shortcuts.

The thing worth learning early is the difference between the three ways one board reaches another, because they solve different problems and only one of them affects the story’s flow.

If the nodes are the wrong shape

The node builder is where a node type is authored: its fields, its appearance, and how it may connect.

This is the track most people postpone and then wish they had not. TaleShard ships a starter pack — Text, Dialogue, Entry, Branch, Jump, Board, Element, Code — but none of it is privileged. A node type is ordinary project data. If your story wants a node with a stat block, a timer and three portraits, that is a schema you author, not a feature request.

If the story is about something

Modelling the world — characters, items, locations, factions. Declare a definition (the shape), create items against it (the instances), and let traits share a block of fields between definitions that are otherwise unrelated.

Prose that is not on a board lives here too, as documents; a document whose kind is a spreadsheet is the same object with a grid instead of a page.

If the second playthrough should differ from the first

Variables, logic and commands — variables and the contexts that group them, tags, the conditions on an exit, the scripts on a node, and the expression language all of it is written in.

Commands is the page for the boundary: a command is how the story tells a game to do something the story cannot do itself, and it is the one concept that is authored here and implemented over in the engine.

If it has to look like something

Play mode covers both of its tabs — Play, walking the story, and Design, dressing it. Media covers uploads, thumbnails and the media codes that let an expression name a file.

If it has to leave TaleShard

Localization is the translation round trip: what goes out, in which format, and exactly what a bad file back does.

Screenplay is the other direction — bringing a Final Draft or Fountain script in and turning it into boards.

And when the story is going into a game, that is a different product with its own manual: the Unity plugin.

What is not in this manual

Prices, plans and allowances live on the pricing page, which is the one place they are decided. A docs page will tell you that a limit exists and which guard enforces it; the number per plan is over there.

Anything a guard does not enforce. If you find a limit stated on these pages, something in the product actually refuses at that boundary. Numbers that exist only in a constants file are not published here, because a limit nobody checks is not a limit.