Every field on your world lives in the creator studio. Scenes, NPCs, lore, merchants, tutorials, title screens, VN backgrounds. if it shapes how your world plays, you can edit it here. This guide walks through every panel and explains how studio edits flow into gameplay.Every field on your world lives in the creator studio. Scenes, NPCs, lore, merchants, tutorials, title screens, VN backgrounds. if it shapes how your world plays, you can edit it here. This guide walks through every panel and explains how studio edits flow into gameplay.

#Opening the studio

Open any world you own and click Edit World in the lobby, or navigate directly to /app/play/<world-id>/edit. The studio requires a signed-up account. guests are redirected to the login page. You can only edit worlds where you are the owner.

The studio loads a draft. a mutable copy of your world that autosaves every 800ms as you type. When you're ready, click Publish in the top-right to create a new revision. Drafts persist across sessions, so you can close the studio and come back later. The draft is private to you. players keep playing the last published version until you click Publish.

#The three-column layout

The studio is a three-column shell:

• Left sidebar. tree of every panel, grouped into sections (World, Characters, Mechanics, Assets, Settings). Search panels with the box at the top.
• Center. the active panel. Split the center with the toggle in the top-right to edit two panels side-by-side.
• Right sidebar. context tabs: Inspector (stats + validation), Preview (world card + narration sample), AI Tools (context-sensitive generation).

#World section

#World Overview

Name, setting summary, genres, tone sliders (humor, darkness, formality, intensity), core loop description. These shape every AI response. the narrator reads them on every turn.

#Genre & Themes

The genre archetype drives default mechanics, presentation mode, and narrative profile. Themes are free-form strings that nudge the narrator and compiler toward specific aesthetics.

#Writing Style

Style card. the voice your narrator writes in. You can import a style from a corpus (paste text or a URL), extract key traits, and the narrator will match it.

#Lore

Free-form world lore + history + factions (with rank thresholds and cross-relations). Faction descriptions feed the reputation engine and the narrator's understanding of political dynamics.

#Regions

Add/remove regions, set descriptions, mark starting regions. The GM uses regions to decide where the player can travel and what content is accessible.

#Narrative Style

Controls for recap cadence, pacing, foreshadowing, point-of-no-return warnings, and chapter summaries. Also exposes Narration Perspective: the recommended default for sessions of this world (first person, second person, or third person by the player's persona name). Players see this as the world default in the lobby's Narration picker and can override it for their session; once they start a session, the perspective is locked for the entire run.

#Art Style

Visual vocabulary for cover art, scene images, and NPC portraits. You can regenerate the cover from here.

#Content Policy

Set a hard ceiling on what content the narrator can generate (safe / standard / mature / private-adult). This caps the session tier. a standard-tier world cannot be played at mature tier.

#Scenes

Define scene contracts. In guided and infinite worlds, scenes can be fully authored, hybrid (partial contract + LLM gaps), or fully LLM-generated. In authored story mode, every scene must use authored content and publish validation rejects non-authored scene sources. Each scene has:

• Type (exploration, combat, dialogue, boss, etc.)
• Opening narration (rich text. what the player sees when the scene starts)
• Scene image. prompt or URL for the background. Studio-authored images are used directly during gameplay without calling the AI. In authored story mode, background art must use a concrete image URL; prompt-only scene images are not valid there. During authored play, the active scene's image URL is stamped onto narrator turns, and scenes without a background explicitly clear the previous scene art instead of reusing stale imagery after a transition or reload.
• Participants (NPCs pulled from your world)
• Linked objectives and items
• Transitions (condition-driven paths to other scenes)
• Tone override (scene-specific tone sliders)
• Entry conditions (freeform text)

#Region Connections

Travel routes between regions. distance, danger level, blocked/unlocked state, encounter tables.

#Cross-Region Elements

Multi-region dependencies: key locks, info gates, NPC referrals, item chains, lore reveals. Each connects a prerequisite region to a payoff region, with descriptions of what must happen in each. The Director uses these to pace progression across a multi-region campaign.

#Dynamic Lore

Discoverable lore entries revealed during gameplay when trigger conditions are met (keyword match, location entry, NPC encounter, objective complete). When discovered, the entry is injected into the world_canon RAG cell and appears in the player's codex.

#Characters section

#NPCs

Every NPC has 17 fields:

• Basics. name, narrative role (quest giver, ally, antagonist, mentor, etc.), faction
• Demographics. gender, age range, tier (important / combatant / background), HUD visibility
• Personality. rich-text personality description, HEXACO sliders (6 axes: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness)
• Narrative. backstory (2-3 sentences fed to the narrator), goals (concrete behavior drivers), narrative weight slider, secrets, quest hooks
• Relationships. links to other NPCs with type (ally, rival, mentor, lover, etc.) and description
• Appearance. a canonical physical description (hair, build, age, attire, one distinguishing feature) plus the image-only avatarPrompt and voice profile ID. The narrator, opening prose, lore, and cover all read this description as canon, and the portrait is rendered from it — see Character identity for the full write/read path.
• Content policy cap. hard ceiling on interactions with this NPC (auto-defaults based on age range)

#Mechanics section

#Mechanics

Master toggle for combat, puzzles, progression, items, dice, objectives, survival, consequences, GM, market, TTRPG, and environment. Disabling a system at the blueprint level turns off the corresponding runtime engine.

#Objectives

Quest DAG. each objective has type (main/sub/optional/hidden/timed), description (rich text), prerequisite objectives, visibility (visible/hidden/discovered), completion + failure conditions (visual predicate builder), and rewards (XP, flags, items).

#Endings

Branching campaign conclusions. Each ending has a title, type, priority, conditions (predicate builder), and epilogue variants with rich-text prose and tone selection (triumphant, bittersweet, tragic, mysterious, open-ended).

#Consequences

Long-tail effects that mature over N turns. Author a narrative seed, set the conditions, and the Director will surface it at the right moment.

#Items

Item catalog. weapons, armor, consumables, quest items. Each has stats, rarity, slot assignments, and optional lore.

#Loot Tables

Drop tables for enemies, chests, and rewards. Link items by ID with weighted probabilities.

#Crafting

Recipes: inputs → outputs with discovery rules and skill requirements.

#Survival

Hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature. pressure profiles with decay rates and severity thresholds.

#Environment

Day/night cycles, weather patterns, environmental modifiers that affect combat and dialogue.

#Character Creation

Define archetypes players can choose at session start. each archetype has a description, avatar prompt seed, and starting stat bundle.

#Reputation

Faction reputation engine. standing tiers, cross-faction effects, moral alignment tracking.

#Merchants

Shops with type (fixed / traveling / event), region assignment, NPC link, faction, base stock (pulled from item catalog), sell discount, restock trigger, currency.

#Market

Deterministic market simulation. price curves, supply/demand, regional price differences.

#Multiplayer

Max players, supported modes (solo, co-op, competitive), turn mode (sequential, simultaneous, adaptive).

#Game Master

GM profile. style, verbosity, fairness, improvisational flexibility, ruling preferences.

#Assets section

#Asset Browser

Browse, search, and manage the game art for your world. The browser shows assets bound to your blueprint alongside the full public catalog, filtered by type (tilesheet, spritesheet, icon set, environment, UI element), genre, art style, and free-text tags.

The catalog draws from two sources:

• Stock art. CC0-licensed professional game art from Kenney (60,000+ assets), OpenGameArt (community-contributed pixel art, tiles, and sprites), and curated itch.io packs. Stock assets are grouped into visually coherent packs where every image shares the same palette, outline weight, and lighting. During catalog search, stock assets receive a 1.2x relevance boost because human-curated art coheres better within a set than independent AI generations.
• AI-generated art. Created by the Asset Forge during compilation when the catalog has no match. Each generated asset enters the public catalog (unless marked private) so future compilations can reuse it.

When a stock pack matches your world's genre and art style, the forge pulls the entire pack, so floor tiles, character sprites, and item icons all share the same visual family. Missing assets get AI-generated with the pack's style anchor as a reference image, ensuring the generated art inherits the same lighting, palette, and texture.

#Asset Packs

Packs are complete sets of visually consistent assets grouped by genre and art style. Each pack carries two metadata artifacts the forge uses for cohesion:

• Style anchor. The most representative image. All AI-generated gap-fillers reference this image so they match the pack's visual DNA.
• Cohesion description. A structured profile of the pack's texture, lighting direction, dominant palette (hex values), outline characteristics, shading technique, scale, and perspective.

Browse other creators' public packs from the Asset Browser. Click Use this pack to import all assets into your current blueprint.

#Asset privacy

Catalog assets generated for your games (sprites, tiles, icons, music, SFX, ambient loops, NPC voices) carry a visibility: public rows join the shared catalog and can be reused by other creators' games; private rows stay yours. The rules by plan:

• Free plan. Every generated and uploaded asset publishes to the public catalog. The visibility controls are disabled with an upgrade hint; this is how the shared catalog grows.
• Paid plans (Plus, Pro, Forge). You control visibility at three scopes:
  • Per asset. Flip any asset you authored between public and private from the Asset Browser or your account catalog pages (/app/account/music-catalog and siblings).
  • Per game. "Keep this game's assets private" in the Asset Browser or the Settings panel makes new generations for that game default private, with a one-click sweep over the game's existing assets.
  • All games. The account-wide default in /app/settings (next to the remix defaults) sets the visibility for newly generated assets everywhere, with an optional apply-to-existing sweep that can target only AI-generated rows so uploads stay put.

Resolution order for a new asset: per-game flag, then your account default, then the plan baseline (Forge defaults private; Plus and Pro default public). Generating public costs 5 credits per asset, private costs 10. Making a row private removes it from catalog search; games that already bound it keep working. This is separate from Visual Style Privacy (the Forge-only toggle in Settings that keeps painted scene images out of the cross-world reuse pool) and from the world's own visibility.

#Settings section

#Game Shell

Seven tabbed sub-sections controlling the non-diegetic wrapper around gameplay:

• Story Mode. authored, guided, or infinite. This is the top-level narrative generation policy for the world. authored locks the experience to creator-defined scenes and disables prompt-only scene painting. guided is the default: creators define anchors and the AI fills gaps between them. infinite gives the Director full authority to generate arcs, scenes, and pacing on demand.
• Title Screen. mode (none / minimal / cinematic / interactive), world title, tagline, logo style, duration, skippable toggle, cover image URL, and five composable visual effects layers (background animation, particles, text treatment, color palette, timing curve. 30,000+ unique combinations).
• Dialogue. response mode (freeform / choice-only / hybrid / choice-with-custom / voice-hybrid), presentation style (chat bubbles / classic box / visual novel / cinematic / minimal), choice count (3-5), tone chips, gated choices.
• Tutorial. mode (none / first-scene-guided / contextual-tooltips / interactive-walkthrough / calibration-first / replayable-help), skip enabled, replay enabled, calibration required.
• Hints. master toggle, mode (off / manual / stall-triggered / progressive / adaptive / character-whisper / adaptive-puzzle), delivery channel (narrator / character / UI overlay / codex nudge), spoiler budget slider (1-5), stall detection (turns + minutes + failures), cooldown, max per objective.
• Story UX. recap on resume, recap minutes, point-of-no-return warnings, chapter summaries, objective reminder cadence, ending foreshadowing.
• Advanced. anti-cliche level (off / standard / aggressive), contextual action suggestions, strategic analysis.

#VN Config

Only relevant for visual-novel family worlds:

• Dialogue mode. ADV (text box at bottom) vs NVL (full-screen scrolling text)
• Default theme. preset name
• Active extensions. extension IDs to enable
• Theme overrides. colors (dialog bg, text, speaker name, choice bg/hover, inner thought, narration), typography (font family, size, line height), animation (typewriter speed, cursor character, transition duration), layout (dialog min/max height, sprite max height), custom CSS injection
• CG Gallery. event illustrations unlocked during gameplay. Each entry has a scene ID, prompt, image URL, and starting unlock state.

#Settings

World-level settings: tagline, visibility (private / unlisted / public), content policy tier, death mode (soft / hard / permadeath / custom), co-op mode (solo / simultaneous / hybrid), allow live editing, allow cloning, linked characters.

#Family-specific panels

Visual novel worlds get four additional panels from the VN family:

#Scene Painter

Gallery of background locations with time-of-day variants. Edit prompts, paste custom image URLs, regenerate via AI, add or remove locations.

#Character Designer

Expression sets per character. Edit display name, base portrait prompt, and each expression slot (neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, embarrassed, thinking). Paste custom URLs or regenerate.

#Route Graph

Visual route/ending editor. Add/remove routes, edit labels, mark secret routes, link to characters, manage unlock conditions (affection threshold, story flag, route complete, choice made, objective complete), link endings.

#Audio Director

BGM and SFX mapping tables. Assign track IDs to scene type + mood combinations, and provide a playable track URL for each BGM you want the VN viewport to actually play. For SFX, actionType is the semantic slot the narrator sees in the prompt, and sfxId is the concrete ID it emits in VN sfx actions. This lets creators keep readable semantic labels like door_open while still mapping them to custom runtime IDs like door_creak.

#Story Studio (Ink and Twine stories)

Interactive-fiction stories open in their own editor at /app/story/<id>/edit, not the game studio. Stories created from scratch at Create a Story or imported from an .ink / .ink.json / Twine HTML file land there directly, and old game-studio edit links redirect.

The Story Studio is a two-pane writing app:

#Write (left pane)

A full-height code editor with syntax highlighting for both engines. Ink stories edit the canonical .ink text: what you write is exactly what plays and exactly what exports. Twine stories edit twee source derived from your published HTML; saves swap your passages back into the original file, so the story format engine you published with keeps rendering, untouched. Validation problems (a missing start passage, duplicate passage names) appear in a slim strip under the editor with clickable line jumps. they're an expected mid-edit state, not a failure.

#Play (right pane)

The live story. Ink recompiles as you type, replays your recorded choice path, and lets you click through choices or restart. Twine reloads the sandboxed story after each save so your edit plays. Drag the divider (or use arrow keys on it) to resize the split.

#Toolbar overlays

Map opens your story's structure: for Ink, an editable graph of knots and stitches where changes write back into the script; for Twine, the passage map. Variables and Enhance (per-passage scene art prompts and ambient moods) open the same way for both engines.

#Replace HTML (Twine)

Twine stories carry a Replace HTML button in the top bar. Publish a new build from Twine, pick the file, confirm, and the story updates in place: every passage is replaced, while the cover, credits, reviews, play stats, and your Enhance work stay. The same checks as import apply (self-contained HTML with its story format engine embedded).

#Details

One slide-over holds everything else: story info, tags, content rating, cover and screenshots, audio, credits and provenance (author byline, publication year, license), publishing, and analytics. The two story checks (title and setting summary) sit at the top. Publish from the top bar when they're green.

On phones the panes become Write / Play tabs at the bottom of the screen.

#The right sidebar

#Inspector

Three cards:

• Validation. checklist of world completeness (world name, setting summary, regions, NPCs, endings for campaigns, item catalog if combat enabled, title screen configured, VN characters/backgrounds for VN worlds, cross-region elements for 3+ region worlds)
• World Stats. 12 counters (regions, NPCs, factions, scenes, items, objectives, endings, loot tables, recipes, dynamic lore, merchants, cross-region elements)
• Active Mechanics. pills showing which engines are enabled
• Completeness. percentage gauge based on validation checks

#Preview

Three modes:

• World Card. mockup showing how your world appears in browse and search. Cover image pulled from gameShell.title.coverImageUrl.
• Narration. click Generate Sample to get a live AI-generated paragraph in your current tone and style.
• Tone Radar. SVG visualization of your four tone sliders.

#AI Tools

Context-sensitive generation tools that change based on the active panel:

• World Overview → Generate Setting Summary, Generate Regions
• NPC Editor → Generate NPCs, Generate NPC Personality, Generate Avatar Prompt
• Lore Editor → Generate Lore, Generate History, Generate Factions
• Item Editor → Generate Items
• Endings Editor → Generate Endings
• Art Style → Generate Art Style

Generated content is automatically merged into your draft. regions are appended to world.regions, NPCs to world.npcs, art style to artStyleVocabulary, etc.

Suggestions appear below the tools, flagging missing content (no endings defined, combat enabled but no items, no merchants despite item catalog, etc.). Click Generate to run the matching AI tool, or Go to panel for suggestions without a fix tool.

Research search box lets you look up reference material that gets indexed into your world_canon RAG cell.

#How studio edits reach gameplay

Authored content flows directly into the runtime:

• Scene images. when a scene contract has sceneImageUrl set, the turn pipeline uses it directly and skips AI generation, saving credits. In guided and infinite story modes, sceneImagePrompt without a URL can still drive runtime scene painting. In authored story mode, prompt-only scene images do not render: authored scenes that want background art must provide a concrete sceneImageUrl, Studio warns about that requirement, and the runtime now clears old authored backgrounds when the next authored scene intentionally has no image.
• NPC avatars. avatarPrompt is consumed by the enrichment pipeline (generates portraits at compile time) and by the runtime async portrait step (when new NPCs appear mid-session).
• Dynamic lore. discovered entries are injected into the world_canon RAG cell so the narrator references them when relevant.
• Dialogue mode, title effects, tutorial config, hint policy. read directly by the shell runtime.
• Merchants. the MerchantEngine spawns shops based on your definitions with restock triggers.
• Endings. the EndingEngine evaluates conditions every turn.

#Visibility

Every world has one of three visibility levels, set in the studio Settings panel and changeable anytime:

• Private (only you). Only you can open it. It never appears in Browse or search, and the direct link will not work for anyone else. New worlds start here.
• Unlisted (link-only). Anyone with the direct link can open and play it, but it stays out of Browse, search, and your public profile. Use it to share a work in progress with specific people without publishing to the catalog.
• Public (browsable). Listed in Browse and search and discoverable by everyone. Public worlds can be featured on your profile and, with Allow cloning on, remixed by other creators.

Setting a published world back to Private hides it from the catalog without losing your work or its revision history.

#Publishing

Click Publish in the top-right to open the publish modal:

1. Review your changes
2. Add an optional publish note
3. Confirm

Publishing creates a new immutable revision of the same world. the listing, URL, reviews, and stats stay; only the version advances. Live editing is on by default, so the change reaches active sessions on the player's next turn and each player sees a brief, dismissible "World updated" toast carrying your publish note. structural changes apply to new sessions only. Turn live editing off to keep in-progress players pinned to the revision they started on. New sessions always start on the latest revision. When Allow cloning is on, that toast offers Snapshot previous version so a player can keep the version they were on.

#Forking

Worlds marked with Allow cloning can be forked by other players. Forks inherit your content but become independent drafts owned by the forker. Clone attribution is shown in browse cards and in the studio header.

#References

1. Getting Started: Create your first world before opening the studio.
2. Writing Great Prompts: Better prompts produce better starting blueprints.
3. Creator Economy: Publishing, monetization, and the Forge plan.
4. HEXACO Personality Model: The 6-factor model behind NPC personality sliders.
5. Character Relationships: How trust and personality affect NPC behavior.
6. wilds.ai FAQ: Studio-related questions and troubleshooting.