Storylet Studio

The Standalone Player

The Standalone Player is a self-contained HTML file you build from the Publish pane and hand to a playtester so they can try your storyworld without having Storylet Studio installed, without an account, and without any game engine. They open the file in any browser and they're playing.

It's a convenient helper, not the published runtime artefact: a game shipping a storyworld in production goes through a StoryletEngine plugin instead. The Standalone Player is purpose-built for distribution to playtesters.

If you're the author testing your own work in progress, the Simulate view inside the editor is the everyday tool for that. The Standalone Player is what you produce when you want other people to try your storyworld.

Build one

  1. Open your storyworld and go to the Publish tab.
  2. Under Standalone Player, click Download Player ZIP.
  3. Save the ZIP somewhere you can find it.

The ZIP contains an index.html plus any background images your storymap uses, with your current storyworld bundle embedded. Nothing in the file phones home; nothing needs an internet connection.

A note on size: background images embed at their full source size, so a storyworld with several large backgrounds produces a larger ZIP. That's by design - the player has to be self-contained.

Give it to someone

Send the zip. The recipient extracts and opens index.html in any browser - Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge. No install. No sign-in. No backend. The storyworld runs entirely in the browser tab.

The player saves progress automatically to the browser's local storage and persists across page refreshes. Recipients can use the Reset button in the player to start over, or clear local storage for the page.

What the player UI looks like

The Standalone Player runs the same runtime and the same UI as Storymap > Simulate inside the authoring tool. The controls, the storylet cards, the navigation, the Log button - everything works the same. See Simulate for the full rundown of controls and the action log.

The only differences are environmental:

  • The Standalone Player has no editor or storyworld switcher around it. It's just the play surface.
  • State is per-browser per-file: if the recipient opens the same index.html on a different machine or in a different browser, they start fresh.
  • There's no save-state snapshot system (that lives in Simulate, for the author).