Storyloom is a shared narrative-design space. Beats are nodes on a canvas, wired into a branching flow with the cast, the world and the logic attached. Writers, designers and engineers annotate the same beats on their own layers, review each other's work in place, play the story with live state, and push it to Unity for testing. The loop is: build → annotate per discipline → review together → play → push to Unity. The in-app guided setup walks the same loop in about five minutes.
Every beat is a node: Scene, Dialogue (line-by-line speakers, emotions, string IDs), Choice (options with their own conditions), Check (pass/fail branch), Unlock (apply effects), Random (weighted outcomes), Event (a named trigger for the engine), Ending, Jump, and Discoverable (optional side content found at a host beat). The Game nodes palette adds the vocabulary teams actually use — Combat, Boss fight, Stealth, Puzzle, Minigame, Timed event, Crafting (each branching on the outcome), Shop, Hub, Random encounter, Quest start, Reward, Fast travel — filtered by game type. Each node carries who/where/when/why, status, labels, media and comments. The board keeps itself tidy: nodes never overlap, and lower-priority notes slide out of the way.
File ▸ Import accepts Word (.docx), PDF, Markdown, plain text, or a Google Docs download, and you can paste anything into the box. A document that already follows the outline convention (headings for beats, bullets for cast, -> Target links — the guide and an example are in the dialog) becomes connected nodes directly. Anything else — prose, notes, a design doc, a brainstorm table — is reshaped by AI into that convention first: your words are kept and reorganized, the result stays in the paste box for review, and you import when it looks right. That is the only thing AI does in Storyloom. The same outline can be exported back (File ▸ Export outline) for editing in Docs or Word — a full round trip.
Characters carry role types, species, factions, homes, relationships, traits, motivation, voice direction and short reference clips — plus idle / revisit lines: what they say when the player talks to them and no story beat is due, chosen by conditions first, then exact revisit number, then priority. Locations nest inside regions; items double as inventory; species, factions and lore round out the encyclopedia. Drag any entry onto a beat to tag it, or onto empty canvas to drop a reference card.
Variables are typed (flag, int, float, text) and usable in any condition or effect — on nodes, choice options, links and idle lines. Beyond plain variables, conditions can ask whether the player has an item, has visited or is currently in a location or region, knows a piece of lore, whether a behavior tag is active, or what an NPC's mood is; effects give and take items, teach lore, flip tags and set moods. Behavior tags let one decision switch whole routes on or off — tag the nodes, then enable/disable the tag from any beat's effects. Boards can have several entry points (main start plus side quests or chapters).
Narrative notes, design notes (with reference media that fans out on hover) and tech notes attach to beats and toggle from the top bar, so each discipline sees its own annotations without burying the story. Plain notes take images and pinned references (cast, lore, locations). Locks protect finished beats from accidental edits — moving and connecting still work; hold right-click (or enter the password) to unlock. Cross-project links jump from a beat to a node in another project of the workbook — a discoverable dungeon entrance to the dungeon's own board — and work for everyone sharing the workspace.
Sign in (a magic link or a 6-digit code — no passwords) to save projects to the cloud, group them into workspaces, and share either one: sharing a workspace covers every cloud project in it, present and future, whoever adds them. Two people in the same project get live co-editing with cursors and per-field merging, plus a soft lock on beats a teammate is editing. Comments support replies, reactions, flags, resolution and @mentions; Request review routes a beat to named reviewers with approve / request-changes; Suggest mode turns edits into proposals the owner accepts or rejects. The ✉ Inbox is the one place everything addressed to you lands, with optional email digests. On a phone, Storyloom opens in review mode: read the board, play it, comment, suggest and approve — editing stays on the desktop.
Play steps through the story with live variables, inventory, tags, lore and moods, every gate enforced and every lock explained — from the start, any entry point, or the selected node. Path explorer enumerates routes, endings, dead ends and unreachable beats; Economy view charts variables beat-by-beat along a route; Story check lints the graph; Project targets keeps score against goals; Technical review shows where every tracked variable is read and written, with a chart along the first route. The beat sheet is the whole board as a sortable, editable table; the storyboard prints it as a PDF deck; the script view reads it as a screenplay.
File ▸ Export Unity JSON writes a flat export for the companion package, which imports it, binds prefabs, validates, and generates a playable test scene in top-down, third-person or first-person style — dialogue UI, zones with arrival popups, inventory, discoverables, idle lines, behavior tags, saves. Live link removes the file hop: enable it on a cloud project (File ▸ Live link), paste the URL and token into the Unity story asset, and Re-sync from story pulls the latest save straight from the cloud. Strings export (CSV) supports localization pipelines.