Overview of the Novelty engine

Chapters and Pages

In Novelty, your story is divided into chapters and pages, as you would expect. Novelty will begin playing the story at the first page of the first chapter and move onwards one page at a time until they run out. You have the control to jump back and forth between pages if that is necessary for your particular story, but in general the story will progress in a straight line.

Each page are made up of a visual Scene and a sequence of Actions.

Scenes

Every page has their own unique Scene. This is where you "paint" the visuals of your novel. Your backgrounds, characters and text. You can select and manipulate objects with your mouse and you have the option to organize them in layers if your scene is more complex.

Objects can then be manipulated during play through Actions and Scripts.

Actions

Actions is the name of the graphical programming interface of Novelty. An action can be best described as a contained block of intent. Something you wish to perform in your novel. You create your interactive story by stringing different actions together in a sequence. For instance if you want a character to appear, display a few paragraphs of dialogue or playing a sound. Each of these things can be performed by actions.

Each page have their own list of actions and they are triggered one at a time in sequence. Some actions with trigger and instantly trigger the next, while some will wait to complete or wait for the player to press a button.
While actions are triggered sequentially, you have the ability to branch off and set conditions.

Further reading: Using actions, Actions reference

Threads

Threads are "sub-pages", that uses the same scene as its parent page but has its own list of actions. You can use threads to make short conditional diversions in your story.

Screens

Screens are pages that you can bring up at any point in the novel. Their ad hoc nature makes them useful for creating things like popup dialogs and save screens.