Parlance

Your first project

Goal: a running editor, a scaffolded project, one character, one dialogue — and a feel for where everything lives. ~10 minutes.

1. Open a project

Launch Parlance and point it at a project folder — most often the directory of the game repository your story belongs to. (Install & run covers getting the app and what it writes where.)

To start from nothing, use File ▸ New Project… and pick Blank, or scaffold the standard layout from the command line:

parlance init my-story

Either way you get a data/ folder with a subdirectory or registry file for each entity type, ready to open. (Parlance never scaffolds a folder you open: one without a data/ directory, a parlance.config.json or a schema/ directory is refused as not a project, so you can't accidentally seed your Downloads folder.)

2. Learn the four regions

The editor is one screen with four fixed regions:

  1. Type sidebar (far left) — one row per entity type with a live count. Reports is pinned to its footer.
  2. Entity list — search, group, and a + New button for the selected type.
  3. Main panel — a form for most entities; a canvas for dialogues and quests; an overview when no entity is selected (the scene flow for Dialogues, the dependency graph for Quests, the map for Locations), and Reports from the sidebar footer.
  4. Validation bar (bottom) — live error/warning counts, collapsed to a status row until you click it.

Press Cmd/Ctrl+K now — the command palette fuzzy-matches every entity and action in the project and is the fastest way anywhere. Make it a habit on day one.

3. Create a character

  1. Select Characters in the sidebar, click + New.
  2. The box takes just an id: type npc_gatekeeper and press Enter (or Create). The file data/characters/npc_gatekeeper.json now exists on disk; check your git status if you want proof.
  3. The form you're looking at is generated from the character schema — every field validated, references offered as dropdowns. The new character is called New Character: set Name to Gatekeeper and click Save (the form holds your edits until you do).

Notice the validation bar: the project now has a COVERAGE warning — character has no dialogue. The validator noticed before you did; it's that kind of colleague. Leave it for a moment.

4. Create a dialogue

  1. Dialogues → + New → id dlg_gate_first.
  2. The main panel is now the dialogue canvas, with one entry node, node_start. Click it and replace the placeholder in the inspector's Text field with "The gatekeeper looks you over." — notice it's a serif prose field with a live word count: narrative text is typographically first-class.
  3. At the top of the inspector, in its Dialogue section, set Default speaker to the Gatekeeper. The gatekeeper now speaks a dialogue, so the COVERAGE warning clears — and an OFFER warning takes its place: 1 speaker dialogue(s) are offered by nothing and have no world placement — unreachable. Speaking a scene doesn't make it playable; the game also has to know when to start it.
  4. In the same section, click + Offer this dialogue. Leave offered when empty — it reads always (the fallback). The gatekeeper now presents this scene whenever the player approaches, and the OFFER warning clears.

5. Watch validation work for you

Delete the dialogue (toolbar → Delete dialogue → Confirm delete) and watch the validation bar: the character's only dialogue went with it, so npc_gatekeeper has nothing to say — a COVERAGE warning naming the exact character. Click the issue row: it navigates straight to them. Undo the deletion with Cmd/Ctrl+Z; the warning clears. That save-validate-navigate loop is the core of how Parlance feels — nothing broken gets to hide.

6. Open something real

An empty project teaches layout; a real one teaches craft. Open The Mistfall Inn — the demo mystery behind the playable demo on this site — with File ▸ Open the Demo, and poke around. It opens a copy in Documents/Parlance, so nothing you change there can break the original. Three characters with offers, a quest with three outcomes, route fixtures, zero validation issues under --strict.

Where next