Docs/Testing & publishing

Reading Simulation

Reading Simulation replaces the editor view with the reader view. Triggers fire, decisions open, dice roll, combat plays out turn by turn, and trades open at the right moments. It's the closest you can get to seeing your book the way a reader will, without leaving the editor.

Where to find it

Every book's sidebar has a Simulate Reading button at the bottom. Right above it is a small dropdown for picking a playable character to read as. You can pick one or skip it (see below); clicking the button swaps the editor for the reader view and opens the book at chapter one.

Starting a session

The session behaves like a real read. Paragraphs appear in order, Triggers run, and Dynamic Components open when the story reaches them. Nothing in the reader runtime is mocked; the simulation runs the same code your readers will.

A few books need a playable character. Most don't:

Required when any Trigger or Dynamic Component in the book points at the Reader placeholder. The sidebar tells you when this applies. The character picker only shows Glossary Items with Playable turned on.
Optional for every other book. A branching story that never uses the Reader placeholder runs fine with no character picked, and the sidebar's "playable required" gate disappears.

The session doesn't read your live draft. When it starts, it binds to your latest Snapshot of the book, taking one automatically if you have none, and reads from that frozen copy. Later edits stay out of the session until you bind it to a fresh Snapshot; the Triggers tab shows how old the current one is.

State accumulates as you go

A reading session isn't a dry run. Everything that happens is recorded against it:

Facts changed by decisions, dice rolls, combat outcomes, or trades.
Glossary Items that were revealed or hidden.
Chapters and headers that Triggers opened.
Your position: last chapter and last section. You can leave the simulation, edit a chapter, and return to where you left off.

The in-book sidebar with the chapter list also has a Triggers tab. While you're simulating, it shows a live log of every Trigger that fired, along with your decisions, rolls, and outcomes. Use it to work out why a branch went the way it did.

Jumping into the middle

Tip

Trigger cards and reveal cards on the Story Canvas can be Play from here starting points. Pick one and the session starts at that card, with the prior path already played: Glossary Items revealed, facts set, Triggers fired. It's the fastest way to test the back half of a long book without playing the front every time.

Rewinding and resetting

The simulation's Triggers tab logs every Trigger that fires as you read. You can do two things during a session:

Rewind to a logged Trigger. Pick any entry in the log to roll the session back to that moment. That Trigger and everything after it are undone. The session lands at the Trigger's position, so you can play forward again with different choices.
Switch playable character. Pick a different character from the sidebar dropdown. Each playable character has its own session against the same book, so you can keep multiple run-throughs side by side and jump between them without losing state.