Part two of three. You played the demo; now Iris explains the shape of what you just walked through, before you touch the editor. You will want paper.
Hi! I'm Iris. If you build an event with this tool, I'm the one who shows up on the guests' phones and walks them through it. You're building the place where I work, so here's the tour before you start construction.
Here's the secret of the whole tool, up front, so nothing later feels scary: it is boxes and arrows. Everything else is forms. I happen to love the forms. You don't have to. The boxes and arrows are the job.
One rule first, about the room you'll work in, because it's the first thing you'll bump into. The project doesn't live on your computer. It lives on a shelf we all share, so your co-writer in the next town opens the exact same thing you do. But two people can't scribble on one page at once without it turning to mush, so the rule is: one chair.
You sit down by clocking in, and while you're in the chair the project is yours and everyone else sees it's taken and who has it. When you're done you clock out and the chair is free. If the top bar ever says READ-ONLY, you're standing next to the desk, not sitting at it: you can look, but nothing you type gets filed until you clock in. And if you wander off and leave the chair warm, I'll eventually ask if you're still there, save your page for you, and tip you out of the seat so the next person isn't stuck waiting. Nothing's lost.
Real paper, a pen. You're going to draw the whole event first, so the editor is your second time through it. The second time through anything is easier.
Draw a box. Inside it, write one thing somebody says. One box, one line.
Draw a second box underneath and write the next line in that one. Why two boxes instead of one long list? Because soon you'll want the story to split, and a story can only split between boxes. Boxes are where the story can split.
Draw an arrow from the first box to the second. When a guest taps their screen, they slide down your arrow. Now put a little star on the first box. Every sheet needs one starred box so I know where to start reading; without the star I start in the wrong place.
Now the fun part. Pick a box and draw two arrows out of it, going to two different boxes. On each arrow, write the words the guest will see on their button. That's a choice. The guest reads both arrows, picks one, and the other one never happens.
Three or four arrows out of one box is fine.
One sheet of paper is one story. A story is a chunk that plays start to finish, a few minutes of somebody's day: one sheet for meeting me, one for each thing to do at the venue. Don't draw arrows between sheets. Sheets get connected by the real world, which is the next part.
Flip to a fresh page and draw your venue; badly is fine. Mark an X anywhere you could tape a QR code: a table, the weird pillar nobody uses. Each X points at one of your sheets. A guest walks up, scans the code, and that sheet starts playing on their phone, starred box first.
That's a Place. The story lives on the phone; the Places nail it to the floor.
Guests re-scan, so a Place that's already been played doesn't start over, it gives a little revisit: I say one short line and send them on their way. If you want, that revisit can be a tiny story of its own that counts the visits and says something different the second and third time. You don't have to set any of this up to start; a finished Place has a polite built-in line. It's a good spot for a small extra line for repeat scanners.
My favorite part. I keep a clipboard. Every guest gets their own sheet on it.
Any box can write a note on the clipboard: "did the lanterns: yes." "knows about the rift: yes." And any arrow or any Place can check the clipboard before it opens. So the door table can refuse to play until "did the lanterns" says yes, and a choice can appear for the guests who were nice to me earlier and nobody else.
On paper: write the note in the corner of the box that earns it. On any arrow or X that should care, write "only if" and the note. The editor calls these variables, which sounds like math and isn't: they're notes about one guest.
One more trick. Not every note is a checkbox: a box can ask the guest a question and write down whatever they type. Their name, a codename. Once it's on the clipboard I can read it back: a line that says "Good to see you again, {{codename}}" puts their own word in the sentence. Write the curly brackets and I'll swap in what they told me. It gets gasps every time.
Almost there, and this is the last bit of the event itself. When a guest opens their phone without scanning anything, they see me. First visit, there's a Start button, and it plays whichever sheet you picked as our first meeting. After that the button says Continue and opens a list of things to talk to me about. Topics check the clipboard too, so the list grows as the guest does things.
This is the part that makes an event feel like it remembers people. It does. I keep the notes.
When you save to the server, you're putting the page back on the shared shelf. That's the real save, the one your co-writer will open tomorrow. Do it often.
You'll also see Save to file, which hands you a photocopy to drop in your bag. That's a backup, not the project. Keep it for safety, but don't email it to your co-writer to work on, because the shelf can only hold one of them, and somebody's work loses. The shelf is the real one.
The last thing, and it's the one that saves you at the event: you never have to guess what a guest will see. There are three rehearsals, and they go from cheap to real.
Playtesting is you, alone, running the whole thing on a fake phone right there in the editor. It's the read-through. Tap your own choices, watch the clipboard fill in, catch the line that doesn't make sense. It forgets everything when you reload, which is what you want while trying things.
A test space is the same event, but living on a real link you can text to a real person on their real phone. This is the dress rehearsal: hand it to a friend, watch them get lost where you didn't expect, and their progress sticks the way it would at the event. When you're done poking at it, you wipe it.
And deploy is opening night: the real event, real QR codes on the walls. By then you'll have already watched someone play it, so it won't be a surprise. That's the point of the first two. The guests can surprise me; the tool shouldn't.
Your paper is the plan. The editor is the same drawing, with the boxes and arrows on a screen instead of a page, and a star you set the same way, except there it plays. Take part three next: it's not me in there, it's a very polite arrow that points at things, but it walks you through rebuilding the exact demo you played in part one, images and locked door and all. Bring the paper. You already did the hard part.