Publishing & Sharing

Publishing turns your story into a link anyone can open and play — without touching your live, editable story. It happens in two steps: freeze a snapshot, then publish a version of it. All of this lives on the story's Settings page.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a frozen copy of your entire story — every beat, scene, character, and the blackboard — taken at the moment you create it. New snapshot in the Snapshots section confirms with "This will freeze the current state of your story and beats" and saves the copy; further edits in the editor don't touch it. A story can hold up to 20 snapshots at once, shown newest first as cards with their creation date — snapshots don't have names of their own, so the date is how you tell them apart.

A snapshot isn't permanently locked: each card's menu has Update to current, which re-freezes it with your story's current state in place — anyone with a link published from that snapshot will see the refreshed content next time they open it. Delete removes the snapshot along with every publication made from it, breaking their links.

Publishing a version

Publishing takes a snapshot and turns it into a shareable link, with its own starting beat and variable overrides — the same override picker used when testing. Give it a label (so you can tell versions apart later — e.g. "Beta test - forest route"), pick a starting beat from that snapshot, and optionally override some variables, then confirm to get a link.

There are two ways in: the Publish button at the top of the Settings page creates a new snapshot and publishes from it in one go — the fast path when you just want a link to your story as it is right now. Or click Publish on a specific snapshot card to publish from that exact frozen state. Either way, one snapshot can carry up to 15 published versions, each with its own label, starting point, and overrides — handy for sending different testers into different parts of the same frozen story. You'll need a verified email to publish.

Sharing and managing links

After publishing, you get a Copy button next to the /play/… URL. Every version you've published from a snapshot is also listed on its card afterwards, each with its own Copy URL button. There's no way to temporarily disable a link — deleting a publication is the only way to take one down, and it stops working immediately.

A published link plays through the same engine as Test, but without any of the debug annotations — just the story, reacting to whatever conditions and variables it was given.