Themes

A theme is the look of your story: its colors, its font, its effects.

The same scene, several moods

With identical content, each theme gives a completely different mood. Here is the same sequence running under several themes, seen on a phone. Only the look changes.

The same sequence, dressed by different themes.

The Themes tab

Your themes are managed in the Themes tab. The right-hand panel shows a live preview of the selected theme.

The Themes tab: the list on the left, the preview on the right.

The New theme button starts from one of the supplied presets (about twenty of them) or copies an existing theme. The pencil opens the theme editor (colors, font, borders, effects, sounds).

Having a theme suggested to you

To the right of New theme, a dice-shaped button with the tooltip Generate opens the generator. It offers you six themes at once, and the one you keep is added to your list. None of your existing themes is touched.

Three settings steer the roll.

• Style, which gives the direction. Ten named styles, each with its description: Editorial, Plain, Minimal, Fun, Colourful, Dark, Retro, Storybook, Comic and Night. The style constrains the palette, the shapes and the motion, and the roll only varies inside it. Random changes style with every proposal.
• Colour pairing: Shades for neighbouring hues, Opposites to make the buttons stand out, Trio for something lively, or Random.
• Background: Dark, Light, or Random.

To the right of the proposals, Preview is a real player running the one you picked, not a demo image. Roll again draws six new proposals.

The theme you create takes the name of its style, which you can change afterwards.

The six proposals on the left, the preview of the chosen one on the right. Roll again draws six more.

Every proposal is readable

The generator does not roll blind: it checks that the text reads on its bubble and the label on its button. So you never end up with a theme that looks lovely and cannot be read.

A theme editor: colors, font, and one tab per facet of the look, plus Extensions when a sequence type in your story has its own look settings.

The right-hand panel has two modes, in its header. Story shows your story dressed by the theme. Previews lines up the seven screens where the look plays out: the Text bubble, the Choice buttons, the Code keypad, the Timer, the Item gained, the Item handed over and the Game ending.

All seven stay there at all times, whichever settings tab is open. That is on purpose: a text color shows up just as much on the code keypad as on the final screen, and it is better to see it right away than to discover it while playing.

The seven screens, dressed by the selected theme. Each one replays in place.

Six tabs share out the look: Text, Buttons, Scene, Items, Sounds and Transitions.

• Scene covers the backdrop, and the Game bar at the top of the screen: its background color, the color of its icons, the inventory button icon, and whether the number of items carried is shown.
• Items sets what happens when the reader is granted an item: the Gained item reveal and the Reveal decoration.

Note

The inventory window itself has no setting: its palette is fixed. What the Scene tab dresses really is the game bar.

The Scene tab also carries the Particle effect, which drops something in front of the scene: Snow, Rain, Dust or Sparkles, with their options.

Gradients, and where they apply

Four backgrounds accept a Gradient rather than a flat color. The color picker offers a dedicated tab for them:

• the scene background,
• the bubble background,
• the button background,
• the Game bar background.

The text, border and icon colors do not accept one.

Note

The generator lays gradients on those four surfaces itself, more or less depending on the style. Night and Colourful use them readily, Minimal, Editorial and Comic never.

How the text appears

In the theme editor’s Text tab, the Text animation section sets the way text writes itself on screen. A switch turns it on, and eight presets save you from adjusting everything: Typewriter, Fade, Word by word, Airport flip, Scramble, Wave, Focus and Bounce.

A preset is only a set of values. Fine-tune opens the detail: the Granularity (per character or per word), the Speed, the effect, the start state and the cursor. Touching any one of these settings switches the preset to Custom, and picking a preset again rewrites the lot.

The eight presets, the speed, and Fine-tune for the detail.

A speed, not a duration

The pace is set in units per second, not as a total duration. That is what makes a short text and a long text read at the same cadence. A fixed duration would have sped one up and slowed the other down according to a length you do not know when you set it.

A text never takes more than six seconds to appear: beyond that, the cadence speeds up, so that a long paragraph does not hold your reader up.

Note

An older theme is converted on its own, when it is opened and when it is imported. If it had never been touched, it receives the matching preset. Otherwise its values are kept and it moves to Custom.

Applying a theme

One theme in the list carries the Default badge: that is the one dressing the whole story. To change it, open the … menu of the theme you want and choose Set as default.

One theme per sequence

A sequence can also carry its own theme, for the length of a passage: a dream, a flashback, a shift in tone. As soon as the story has several themes, a selector appears at the top of the sequence panel, next to its name, under the tooltip Sequence theme.