Novel

The novel plugin turns your screenplay and artwork into a playable visual novel. It moves the reader through the story, loads beats and PSDs, chooses cues and camera framing, draws each scene, and manages saves.

Every novel command can be decorated.

Page	What it covers
Navigation	Moving through the story and the call stack
State and saves	Updating and committing beats, and quicksaves
Menus and input	The menu and scope stacks, and input bindings
Assets	Loading screenplays and PSDs, and choosing images, cues, and locales
Drawing	Drawing scenes and menus, layer by layer

View state

Novel adds these fields to the shared view state, so your interface can show the story:

interface ViewState {
  activeCue: null | ActiveCue;
  content: Array<ContentLine>;
  isRewinding: boolean;
  menuSchema: null | MenuSchema;
}

interface ContentLine {
  lexia: ContentLexia;
  showName: boolean;
}

Field	Description
activeCue	The cue that should be playing.
content	The dialogue and narration lines to show, in screenplay order, and whether to show each speaker’s name.
isRewinding	Whether the reader has stepped back from the latest point in their history.
menuSchema	The schema of the menu on top of the menu stack, or null.

Example

const { content, menuSchema } = getViewState();

A speaker’s name shows when the speaker changes, so a character who speaks several lines in a row is named once, even across beats. While the reader is rewinding, every line shows its speaker’s name. Loading a bookmark starts the naming fresh.

Frame keys

Novel draws into two slots:

Frame key	Shows
scene	The current beat
menu	The menu on top of the menu stack

Novel also declares a timer for each slot. While a menu is open, the scene timer is paused, so the story waits, including any transition in progress, until the menu closes.

To position your own interface against the artwork in these slots, use Web UI’s useLayerBounds hook.

Hot reload

Novel decorates Core’s suspendSession and resumeSession, so the reader returns to the same place in the story after a hot reload during development.