Your first story

Chord Writer opens on a launcher: the product name, your five most recent projects, and three choices. Create Story starts something new, Open finds a project already on disk, and Close Chord Writer quits.

There is no way to dismiss the launcher without choosing. An open app with no project and no route back to the launcher is the state it exists to prevent.

Create the story

File → New Story… (Cmd-N) asks for two things: a title and a folder. The folder follows the title as you type it, so a story called The Orchard is proposed at ~/The Orchard, and it stops following the moment you edit it yourself.

What lands on disk is one file:

The Orchard/
  the-orchard.story

That is the entire project. No package.json, no src/, no tsconfig.json, no dependency install. A .story file needs none of them, and Chord Writer does not write files your story will not use.

Write, and watch Problems

Open the .story file from the project pane and start writing. You do not need to build to find out whether it compiles.

Chord Writer composes the story continuously while you type, a moment after you stop, and lists what it finds in the Problems tab in the bottom dock. It composes the buffer you are looking at rather than the last saved version, so an unsaved edit is checked like any other. Clicking a problem takes you to the line that caused it.

Once a compose succeeds, two things update. The window title becomes the story's own title, taken from the story header rather than the folder name. And the Index tab fills in with what your story actually defines: its rooms, things, people, and the rest, read out of the composed story rather than scraped from the text.

Build and play

Build → Build (Cmd-B) builds the story. The right panel switches to Build and streams the output. If the build succeeds, the panel switches again to Play, and the game is running.

Build → Cancel Build (Cmd-.) stops a build in progress.

Play in the panel exactly as a player would. Runtime errors go to the Game Errors tab in the bottom dock rather than into the transcript, so a broken rule does not interrupt the game text you are reading.

Next

Building, playing, and testing covers the loop in full, including the test tree.