Screenwriting

Screenplays Overview

Write and format production-ready scripts with the screenplay editor.

The screenplay editor is a block-based writing environment for game narrative scripts. It combines industry-standard screenplay formatting with interactive elements that bridge the gap between written scripts and playable dialogue flows.

The screenplay editor showing a formatted script with scene heading, character name, dialogue, and parenthetical elements

When to use Screenplays

Cutscene scripts – cinematics, linear sequences, voiceover sessions
Flow-synced scripts – generate formatted scripts from flow dialogue, or push screenplay edits back into a flow
Branching narratives – use linked pages to write response-driven stories in script format
Design documents – narrative pitch documents in professional format

Element types

Screenplay content is built from 18 element types organized into four categories.

Standard elements

These follow industry-standard screenplay formatting conventions:

Element	Purpose	Example
Scene Heading	Location and time of day	INT. TAVERN - NIGHT
Action	Stage directions and descriptions	The door creaks open slowly.
Character	Speaker identification (ALL CAPS)	JAIME
Dialogue	Spoken lines	I’ve been waiting for you.
Parenthetical	Performance direction	(whispering)
Transition	Scene transitions	CUT TO:
Dual Dialogue	Two characters speaking simultaneously	Side-by-side dialogue columns

Interactive elements

These map directly to flow nodes, bridging screenplays and flows:

Element	Flow equivalent	Purpose
Conditional	Condition node	Branch the script based on a variable
Instruction	Instruction node	Modify variables (set health, update flags)
Response	Dialogue responses	Player choices that branch the narrative

Flow markers

Preserved during round-trip sync between screenplays and flows:

Element	Purpose
Hub Marker	Preserves hub node data during sync
Jump Marker	Preserves jump target data during sync

Utility elements

These exist only in the screenplay editor and are not synced to flows:

Element	Purpose
Note	Writer’s notes (excluded from exports)
Section	Outline headers for organizing long scripts
Page Break	Force a page break in the formatted output
Title Page	Script metadata: title, author, credit, source, draft date, contact

Element type selector showing the four categories: standard, interactive, flow markers, and utility

Writing experience

The editor uses a unified TipTap rich-text editor that understands screenplay structure. Key behaviors:

Auto-detection – typing INT. or EXT. at the start of a line automatically converts it to a Scene Heading. Typing an ALL CAPS name detects it as a Character. Parenthetical text wrapped in () is recognized too.
Rich text – dialogue, action, scene headings, parentheticals, transitions, notes, and sections support bold, italic, and other inline formatting via TipTap.
Variable mentions – reference project variables inside dialogue and action elements using the @ mention system.
Read mode – toggle a distraction-free reading view that hides editing controls.

Organizing screenplays

Screenplays support a tree structure with folders, just like sheets and flows:

Act 1/
  Opening Cinematic
  Tavern Introduction
  First Quest
Act 2/
  The Betrayal
  Forest Chase

Flow synchronization

Link a screenplay to a flow for bidirectional sync between your script and your interactive dialogue.

Push to flow (Screenplay -> Flow)

Converts screenplay elements into flow nodes. Dialogue groups become dialogue nodes, conditionals become condition nodes, instructions become instruction nodes, and responses become dialogue nodes with player choices. The sync creates sequential connections between nodes and auto-positions them in a tree layout.

Pull from flow (Flow -> Screenplay)

Traverses the flow graph via depth-first search and reverse-maps nodes back to screenplay elements. Non-mappeable elements (notes, sections, page breaks) are preserved in their original positions.

How sync works

Each screenplay element tracks its linked_node_id – the flow node it maps to.
Hub markers and jump markers are preserved during round-trip sync so flow navigation structure is not lost.
The sync engine diffs against existing elements/nodes, only creating, updating, or deleting what changed.
If no flow exists yet, one is created automatically when you first sync.

The screenplay toolbar showing the flow sync controls: link status indicator, push-to-flow and pull-from-flow buttons

Linked pages

Response elements contain player choices, and each choice can link to a child screenplay page. This creates a branching tree of screenplay pages visible in the sidebar.

Click a response choice to create or link a child page.
The child page continues the narrative for that branch.
The sidebar tree reflects the branching structure.
During flow sync, linked pages map to response branches in the flow graph, with a maximum tree depth of 20 levels.

Sidebar tree showing a screenplay with linked child pages branching from response choices

Fountain import and export

Storyarn supports Fountain (.fountain) – the industry-standard plain-text screenplay format used by professional screenwriting tools like Final Draft, Highland, WriterSolo, and Fade In.

Export

Converts screenplay elements to Fountain-formatted text. Standard elements are exported with proper Fountain syntax (scene headings, character cues, dialogue indentation, transitions, dual dialogue with ^ marker, sections with #, notes in [[brackets]], page breaks as ===). Rich text formatting is converted to Fountain marks (**bold**, *italic*). Interactive elements (conditionals, instructions, responses, hub/jump markers) are silently stripped from the output.

Title page metadata is exported as Fountain key-value headers: Title, Credit, Author, Source, Draft date, Contact.

Import

Parses Fountain text back into screenplay elements. Supports:

Title page key-value headers
Standard Fountain element detection (INT./EXT. headings, ALL CAPS characters, transitions ending in TO:)
Forced prefixes (. for scene headings, ! for action, @ for characters, > for transitions)
Dual dialogue (^ marker)
Indented document detection (automatic indent-profile analysis for pasted scripts from other tools)
Fountain marks converted to HTML (**bold** to <strong>, *italic* to <em>)