Scenes Overview

Scenes are spatial canvases for mapping your game world. Built on a Leaflet.js canvas with full pan, zoom, and minimap support, they let you lay out locations, define interactive areas, draw connections between places, and – uniquely – explore the result as a player would.

When to use Scenes

• World maps – continent, region, or city layouts with a background image
• Level design outlines – room layouts with navigable connections between areas
• Location hierarchies – drill down from a tavern floor plan into individual rooms
• Interactive exploration maps – player-navigable areas with variable-driven visibility and actions

Canvas elements

Zones

Zones are polygonal regions drawn on the canvas. Vertices are stored as percentage coordinates (0–100) relative to the scene dimensions, so they scale with any background image.

• Shapes – draw zones as rectangles, triangles, circles, or freeform polygons
• Styling – fill color, border color, border width, border style (solid, dashed, dotted), and opacity
• Targets – link a zone to a flow or another scene (for drill-down navigation)
• Actions – none, instruction (execute variable assignments when entered), or display (show a variable value)
• Conditions – hide or disable a zone based on variable conditions, using the same condition builder as flows
• Tooltips – hover text for additional context
• Locking – lock a zone to prevent accidental edits

Pins

Pins are point markers for specific locations. They support four types: location, character, event, and custom.

• Sizes – small, medium, or large
• Targets – link to a sheet, flow, scene, or external URL
• Sheet binding – create a pin directly from a sheet (characters, items) to auto-link it
• Actions and conditions – same system as zones (instruction, display, hide, disable)
• Custom icons – use any icon name or upload a custom icon asset
• Connections – pins serve as endpoints for scene connections

Connections

Connections are visual lines between two pins, representing paths, routes, or relationships.

• Direction – bidirectional (default) or one-way
• Styling – line style (solid, dashed, dotted), line width, and color
• Labels – optional text label with show/hide toggle
• Waypoints – add intermediate points to curve a connection path (up to 50 waypoints)

Annotations

Annotations are text labels placed directly on the canvas for design notes, reminders, or team feedback.

• Font sizes – small, medium, or large
• Colors – customizable text color
• Locking – lock to prevent accidental moves

Layers

Scenes support multiple layers for organizing content. Every scene starts with a default layer.

• Visibility toggle – show or hide layers independently to view different aspects of the same scene
• Layer assignment – every zone, pin, and annotation belongs to a layer
• Fog of war – enable per-layer fog with customizable color and opacity, covering unexplored areas until the player reaches them

Drawing tools

The bottom dock provides 10 tools organized into groups:

The editor switches between Edit mode (dock visible, elements editable) and View mode (read-only, clean canvas).

Zone drill-down

Double-click a zone to drill into it as a child scene. Storyarn automatically:

1. Crops the parent scene’s background image to the zone’s bounding box
2. Upscales the cropped region to a minimum of 1000px (with sharpening) so detail is preserved even at deep zoom levels
3. Creates a new child scene with the extracted image as its background
4. Normalizes the zone’s vertices into the child scene’s coordinate space

This lets you build location hierarchies naturally – a world map with continent zones, each continent drilling down to a regional map, each region to a city, each city to a building floor plan. Every level has its own zones, pins, connections, and layers.

Actions and conditions

Both zones and pins support actions and conditions that tie spatial elements to your variable system.

Actions

Conditions

Attach a condition to any zone or pin using the condition builder. When the condition evaluates to false:

• Hide (default) – the element is removed from the canvas entirely
• Disable – the element remains visible but cannot be interacted with

This lets you create locked doors that unlock when a quest flag is set, NPCs that appear only after a story event, or areas that become accessible based on player progress.

Exploration Mode

No other narrative design tool does this.

Exploration Mode is a fullscreen immersive experience that lets you navigate your scene as a player would. It is not a preview – it is a live simulation of your spatial narrative.

How it works

1. Launch Exploration Mode from the scene header.
2. Navigate by clicking zones and pins on the map. Conditions are evaluated in real time – hidden elements disappear, disabled elements are grayed out.
3. Execute actions – clicking an instruction zone or pin modifies variables immediately. Clicking a display element shows the variable value.
4. Trigger flows – clicking a zone or pin linked to a flow opens a flow dialogue overlay on a dimmed map background. The flow plays in-place (no URL change), including full cross-flow jumps and returns via the engine call stack.
5. Navigate scenes – clicking a zone linked to another scene navigates to that child scene seamlessly.
6. Variable state persists across interactions within the same exploration session.
7. Toggle zone visibility with the toolbar button to see or hide zone boundaries.
8. Keyboard controls – use keyboard shortcuts to navigate and interact.

Flow overlay

When a flow is triggered during exploration, the map dims and the flow dialogue appears as an overlay. You see the same slide-based player experience as the Story Player, complete with dialogue text, speaker info, and player choices. When the flow completes, you return to the map with any variable changes applied.

Floating toolbar

When you select an element on the canvas, a FigJam-style floating toolbar appears above it with quick-edit controls specific to that element type:

• Zones – fill color, opacity, border style, border color, layer picker, lock toggle, drill-down button
• Pins – label, pin type selector, color, size, layer picker, lock toggle
• Connections – line style, color, label, direction toggle
• Annotations – text, font size, color, lock toggle

Advanced properties like targets, conditions, and actions are edited in the side panel that opens when you select an element.

Export

Export any scene to PNG or SVG format directly from the scene header. The export captures the current canvas view including all visible layers, zones, pins, connections, and annotations.

Scene organization

Like all Storyarn entities, scenes support a tree structure in the sidebar. This tree reflects both manual organization and drill-down hierarchies – zones that drill into child scenes create parent-child relationships automatically.

Each scene has a shortcut (e.g., world-map) for cross-referencing, and an optional scale with custom unit and value for the ruler tool.