Editing a narrat game
This documentation page explains how to edit a narrat game
There are two types of content to edit to make a narrat game:
- Dialogue scripts:
.narfiles that contain the branching narrative of the game - Config files:
.yamlfiles that contain config data about the game
The content to edit will usually be inside the
public folder from the root of the game. This public folder is a folder for static assets which will be added to the final build. A narrat game is effectively made of config files and assets that are all inside this folder.For advanced uses, it is also possible to change code itself or integrate plugins, in which case the place to edit those would be the
src folder.Narrat scripts are the main way a game is created. They contain the flow of the game and lines of dialogue.
In the
public/data folder of the game, there is an example.nar file (or named differently depending on which template you used). This is where the actual game dialogue is written. The example dialogue there shows how to use a few basic features, so you can easily start writing your own dialogue. Just above is a link to the example narrat script page to find more examples as needed.Narrat scripts are in a custom language nade for narrat, see the Language Syntax page for more info.
We advise using Visual Studio Code for editing narrat scripts. There is a Narrat Language VS Code extension which will give you great syntax highlighting.
See the page linked below for more details on how to write narrat scripts.
The config file contains basic info about the game. In it are defined images, screens, buttons, musics, skill checks, items, quests and more.
This is also where the script files used in game are listed. By default it only uses
data/example.nar but any amount of scripts can be added to the list and they will all get loaded.The
characters.yaml file contains the config for all characters that can speak in the game. They should all at least have a name value, and an idle sprite. The sprite is used for displaying character portraits during dialogue, and the value should be a file path relative to the imagesPath value defined in the config part of this fileThe color character names appears as can be changed with the
color value in the style property of the character (the value can be any valid CSS color).Making a game is simply a matter of editing those files to write the game you want. To know more about available features, look at the left sidebar of this documentation website to see pages about all the features and guides on specific things.
Many features get added to narrat frequently and some aren't documented yet but explained in the changelog. See the "Updating narrat" page below for more info.