Quests & the journal

Goal: a two-stage quest with real journal writing, advanced by your dialogue, visible in the dependency graph. ~15 minutes. Prereq: branching dialogue.

1. Create the quest

Quests → + New → qst_past_the_gate. The main panel becomes the stage graph — stages flow left-to-right, edges are dependencies.

Add two stages with Add Stage:

• stage_reach_gate — name it Reach the gate
• stage_get_through — Get through

and one outcome with Add Outcome: outcome_inside, kind success.

2. Write the journal — intent vs. retrospect

Open a stage's inspector. Two prose fields, and the difference is the whole point of the journal:

• Objectives (journal) — what the protagonist intends, in her voice, shown while the stage is current: "Talk my way past the gatekeeper — or find papers that will."
• Description (retrospective) — what she did, shown once it's complete: "The gatekeeper waved me through. I didn't ask what changed his mind."

Objectives are rows: reorderable (the journal renders in your order), each with an id (for diffs and the validator — the player never sees it) and an optional show if gate. Gate on knowledge — has she met this person, does she know this place — so a route only appears if she could actually name it. An objective with no gate reads "always visible".

Objectives are display-only — deliberately no effects, no goto. Complete When below decides when the stage is done, whatever route the player took. Two warnings worth knowing on sight: "has completeWhen but no objectives" (an empty journal for the current stage) and "every objective is gated" (states where the stage lists nothing).

3. Wire completion to your scene

Give stage_reach_gate a Complete When of flag talked_past_gate — the flag your dialogue sets. Chain stage_get_through after it, and give the outcome a Reached When.

Two runtime facts save real confusion later (they're spelled out in the engine contract):

• Stage/outcome effects fire through quest resolution, which the host engine runs — condition-gated, once per playthrough, to a fixpoint. An effectful stage with no condition never fires, and the QUEST validator warns about it.
• In playtest, advance_quest shows in the transcript but is a no-op — stage tracking belongs to the engine.

4. Name it for the journal, tag it for the grouping

On the quest's entity form (not the canvas): Journal Name is the player-facing title, and Tags drive the journal's grouping — main vs. side is a tag, never a checkbox, and tags are linted against a controlled vocabulary, so sidequest vs side-quest drift gets flagged instead of splitting your journal.

5. Zoom out

Select Quests in the sidebar with no quest open: the dependency graph shows every quest as a DAG — GATE/CLOSED badges for prerequisites, click any node to dive in. It's the producer's view of the game: what gates what, and where the critical path runs. (Locations get the same treatment.)

For the full structure — requiredFlags/setsFlags, outcome kinds, stage ordering — see the quest canvas chapter. The demo's qst_inquest shows the finished pattern: three stages, three outcomes, one per ending.

Where next

• Validate in CI — including the QUEST checks that catch never-firing stages.