What each stage produces

The pipeline is a state machine, not a chat. Each stage takes named inputs, writes named artifacts, and hands off. You can stop anywhere; you cannot skip ahead of something a stage depends on, and the tool will say so rather than guess.

Mechanic ideation

In: your paragraph of idea. Out: several mechanic proposals, each with a core loop, a scope band and a stated risk.

They are pushed apart deliberately. The point of this stage is to have a real choice, not to be handed one optimum. Accepting one fills in the intake form; it does not apply it.

Direction divergence — approval gate

In: the applied intake form. Out: three narrative directions, one from each designer persona — character drama, systems narrative, world first.

The three are separated on premise, structure and risk, and the tool guarantees that separation rather than ranking them. You choose, optionally recording why.

Beat sheet

In: the chosen direction, the mechanics. Out: acts and beats, each with an emotional charge and bound to at least one mechanic.

This stage converges: it drafts, validates, feeds structured errors back, and revises, up to three rounds. If it still does not converge it escalates to you rather than shipping something that failed its own checks.

Cast · World

In: the beat sheet. Out: a dossier per character — role, motivation, arc, relationships — and a voice bible for each: register, verbal tics, forbidden words. Plus the world bible and canon entries.

The voice bible is what later stages consult when a character opens their mouth, which is why inconsistent voice is a validation finding here rather than something you catch on a read-through.

Quests

In: the beat sheet, the cast. Out: quest briefs and quest state machines — preconditions, effects, failure branches — with every flag they read or write registered in one place.

Registered flags are what makes soft-lock checking possible at all: a state machine that reads a flag nobody sets is a finding, not a mystery you debug in play.

Dialogue

In: quests, cast, canon. Out: dialogue trees, one per quest that needs one, with speakers resolved against the cast and every line allocated a stable string ID.

Checked for dead-end nodes and unreachable nodes.

Carriers

In: the beat sheet, cast, quests. Out: the four ways a story actually reaches a player — cutscene scripts, barks, environmental storytelling, system text — weighted by how you said this game tells its story.

Critique and playthrough simulation

In: whatever exists. Out: findings, not edits.

Critique runs the methodology pack’s checklist over an artifact. Playthrough simulation walks the quest graph looking for the things only a run reveals: motivation breaks, information arriving before the player could care about it, soft locks.

Both hand you findings you accept or reject. Neither of them edits your work.

Revision

In: an artifact you changed, plus the dependency graph. Out: regenerated versions of exactly the downstream artifacts that declared a dependency on what you changed.

Not everything downstream — everything actually downstream. And half price.

Export

In: the finished project. Out: Yarn Spinner .yarn files, a string table as csv and json with stable IDs, and the whole project as a git repository with its complete history.

Never blocked by your balance.