Stories Engine

Stories Engine is a free, open-source editor for writing narrative games that a player experiences through a fake smartphone — text messages, an Instagram-style social feed, phone calls, a photo gallery, a journal, and settings, all inside a believable little phone UI. You write your story once, branching it with a visual chapter graph, flags, and conditions, and export it as a standalone game for Windows, macOS, Linux, or Android — no coding required, no engine dependency for the player, no account, no internet connection needed to play. It's aimed at writers who want to tell an interactive story in the "found phone" / epistolary format without becoming a programmer to do it.

Who this is for

• Writers who want to build an interactive, phone-format visual novel without writing code — see the user guide.
• Developers who want to extend the engine itself — new native apps, new mechanics, or just understanding how it fits together — see Architecture and Building a native app in code.

Quick start

Stories Engine is a Quasar/Vue 3 app that runs as an Electron desktop app.

pnpm install
pnpm run dev:electron

This launches the editor itself in development mode (hot-reload, dev tools). pnpm run dev (no :electron) runs it as a plain browser SPA instead, if you just want to poke at the UI without a native window.

To build/export games or use the LAN phone preview from a local dev checkout, you first need to vendor the engine's own build shell once (a pre-installed copy of the runtime this pipeline assembles projects into — see Architecture: vendoring for why this exists):

pnpm run vendor:game-shell

Then, from inside the running editor: Build (desktop .exe/.app/Linux binary, and/or Android) or Preview on your phone (serves the open project on your local network). Or from the command line, for a packaged build of the editor itself:

pnpm run build:electron        # current platform
pnpm run build:electron:win    # Windows
pnpm run build:electron:linux  # Linux
pnpm run build:electron:mac    # macOS

Linting/formatting:

pnpm run lint         # fix
pnpm run lint:check   # check only

See package.json for the full script list.

How it's organized

• docs/architecture.md — the technical map: the editor/runtime split, the Pinia stores, the three i18n systems, the plug-in entry-type mechanism, the build pipeline. Start here if you're contributing code.
• docs/creating-custom-apps.md — a practical guide to adding a new native phone app (like Messages or Journal) written in Vue.
• docs/user-guide/ — the full author-facing guide: writing chapters, conditions and flags, the no-code custom-app builder, assets and translations, building/exporting, and a pre-publish checklist.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Before touching engine code, read Architecture for the one rule that matters most: code under src/engine/ and src/components/{phone,apps,shared}/ ships in every exported game and must never import from src/editor/ or src/project/ (which never ship) — it's easy to miss because the editor's own dev server won't catch the mistake, only a real export will.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled default assets (sounds, etc.) have their own attribution — see ASSETS_LICENSES.md.