Your first story

One command scaffolds a complete, playable story project:

sharpee init orchard

init asks a few questions (title, author, blurb); pass -y to accept the defaults. The scaffold is a Chord project. If you want the TypeScript story scaffold instead, that is sharpee init orchard --ts, and it belongs to the Sharpee platform track.

📖 Create a new Sharpee story

Creating project...

  ✓ Created orchard.story
  ✓ Created package.json
  ✓ Created .gitignore

🌐 Adding browser client to your Sharpee project

  ✓ Created src/browser-entry.ts (Chord — compiles story.story at boot)
  ✓ Created src/version.ts
  ✓ Created browser/orchard.css
  ✓ Updated package.json (deps + build:browser)

✅ Project created!

Next steps:
  cd orchard
  npm install
  sharpee build             # story + playable web client → dist/web/<id>/
  sharpee play              # play in the terminal

Your story lives in orchard.story — edit it and rebuild.

Run those next steps as printed: cd orchard, then npm install to fetch the platform packages.

The story file

The whole game is orchard.story. The scaffold's version is a one-room world, and it already shows the shape of everything to come:

story "orchard" by "you"
  id: orchard
  version: 0.1.0
  blurb: An interactive fiction adventure

create the Landing
  a room

  A quiet place to begin. Doorways lead everywhere a story might go —
  for now, this landing is the whole world.

create the brass lantern
  aka lamp

  An old brass lantern, dented but serviceable.

create the player
  starts in the Landing
  carries the brass lantern

Three things to notice, because they are the grammar of every Chord story:

• The story header opens the file: title, author, and key: value facts about the story as a whole.
• create blocks declare entities. Indented lines state facts about them: a room composes a kind, aka lamp adds a player-facing synonym, starts in and carries place things.
• Bare prose is description. A paragraph after a blank line inside a create block is what the player sees. No quotes, no keywords; prose is a first-class part of the language.

Chord is line-oriented and indentation-scoped (spaces, not tabs). There are no braces and no statement terminators; the layout is the structure.

Edit and go

Change the Landing's description, save, and the next build or play picks it up. The story compiles at build time, and mistakes come back as named, line-anchored diagnostics rather than runtime surprises.