Story Forge

Story Forge

Writing a novel is not a progress bar. Story Forge gives the whole process a home—idea, outline, draft, revision, art, continuity, rights, and release—while leaving taste and approval with actual people.

The native workspace can run a proposal-only Story Room, show causal and Narrative Pulse maps, edit chapters with live scene context, preserve revision branches, manage unprimed readers plus live reaction bookmarks and research, prepare ImageGen art, author music auditions, measure WonderSwan adaptation drift, prove story delivery against exhaustive SwanSong evidence, manage a catalog, and build EPUB/PDF editions without turning an automated score into a claim that a book is good.

Story Forge was introduced in SwanSong 0.5.0 and remains included in current stable and beta releases.

Story Forge remains the source of narrative policy and tools. SwanSong Desktop provides the fixed, visible interface. This avoids a second story engine whose rules could drift from the repository that owns the framework.

Why these tools exist

The repository's maintained light-novel quality standard records the product principles behind the workbench. The short version is:

• connected causes help events remain available in memory, so Pulse shows causal load and missing setup/payoff links;
• attention, affect, imagery, and character engagement matter, so Story Forge keeps human reader reactions instead of manufacturing a quality score;
• suspense depends on meaningful anticipation and concern, not arbitrary confusion, so open questions retain stakes and consequences; and
• music changes empathy and scene interpretation, so motif intent and native playback are checked together.

Those findings justify diagnostic questions, not a required emotional curve. Every automated report remains subordinate to editors, real readers, players, and named human approvals.

Connect the framework

1. Open Story Forge under Tools.
2. Choose the swansong-story-forge repository. SwanSong requires its complete scripts folder, schema-v3 starter, and all current report tools.
3. Choose the folder that contains your novel projects.
4. Create a novel or open its dependency-free novel.json.

The selected framework, catalog, and manifest are remembered locally. SwanSong does not scan the Mac for manuscripts or upload them. An explicit SWANSONG_STORY_FORGE_DIR development override is available; the normal app uses the folder selected in the interface.

Nine workspaces

Overview

Create a novella, short light novel, or full volume with a genre profile and target length. The stage rail keeps Concept, Outline, Draft, Revision, and Release distinct. Checking a later stage includes every earlier gate.

The overview keeps chapter, scene, reader, report, illustration, rights, and soundtrack facts separate. A passing automated gate means the required evidence is present and internally current. It does not replace an editor, unprimed readers, or named human approval.

Show Next Actions reads the exact project and gives a short evidence-backed queue instead of a generic checklist.

Story Room

Prepare fresh packets for the premise scout, story architect, character editor, continuity editor, prose editor, art director, music director, and release editor. Every packet has the same project context, a bounded specialty, and a proposal-only output contract. The human lead writer selects and merges work.

No specialist silently edits prose or canon, invents a reader, or approves art, music, rights, or release evidence.

Map & Draft

Build Map creates a browser-readable view of chapters, causal scene turns, relationships, setups/payoffs, continuity, rhythm, illustrations, and music. The native manuscript editor opens Markdown chapters, makes unsaved changes visible, and saves only when asked. Choose a stable scene ID to refresh live context: goal, pressure, turn, decision, consequence, adjacent scenes, relationships, rhythm, art, music, and warnings.

Build Pulse adds load-bearing events, open reader questions, motif appearances, and long stretches whose tension, warmth, humor, and wonder barely change. It is a revision aid, not a required emotional curve or quality score.

Revision snapshots are immutable. Compare any named snapshot with the current manuscript, then append an accept, partial, or reject decision and rationale to the timeline. Existing decisions are never rewritten.

Editorial

Run the complete suite or one report at a time:

• character voice;
• prose polish;
• chapter momentum and emotional rhythm;
• scene delivery;
• typed continuity;
• reader-feedback synthesis;
• rights and release; and
• soundtrack bible.

Reader synthesis preserves meaningful disagreement and deliberate non-changes. It never averages taste into one score. Continuity tracks time, location, costume, injury, objects, promises, relationships, knowledge, and conditions through stable scene IDs.

Readers & Research

Reader Lab exports a spoiler-free manuscript and neutral response form. It does not prime readers with the outline or desired revision. Import requires the current manuscript hash, a real reader identity, every answer, explicit local storage consent, and a response that has not already been imported.

Live Reader Moments begins a manuscript-hash-bound session for a named real reader. During or immediately after the read, preserve the scene and the reader's own short note as laughed, moved, confused, paused, bored, or wanted more. SwanSong keeps those moments separate and never turns them into an average taste score. A manuscript change requires a fresh session.

The research notebook links sources to claims, claims to scenes, confidence, sensitivity, and authenticity review. The genre specialist adds mystery clue fairness, romance boundary and reciprocity, cozy sincerity, comedy escalation, or adventure competence questions without flattening taste.

Art & Music

Prepare Art Room assembles the visual contract, reference pack, moment queue, and status. Prompt history is append-only. Every new or replacement cover, interior illustration, character design, prop sheet, and location key starts in ImageGen. SwanSong does not draw a placeholder when ImageGen art is missing. Intake preserves the original image and prompt record, binds an exact hash, and resets approval to pending.

Review Illustration Set verifies source provenance, current hashes, composition, character and prop continuity, eye line, artifacts or accidental lettering, must-show/must-avoid delivery, and the complete contact sheet. Approval remains bound to the exact image set.

Music is optional. Music Room creates editable four-channel sketches, renders two mono loops, and measures peak, RMS, duration, and seam delta. The soundtrack report still checks hooks, motif transformations, cue purpose, loop intent, mono safety, and WonderSwan roles. Generated notes are auditions; a person still decides whether the exact music is fun.

Adaptation

Compile Scaffold creates a .wscvn.json authoring project, source map, and per-scene Story Proof contract that preserve novel scene IDs, turns, decisions, consequences, setups, payoffs, and lossless 26×4 text pagination. It always says production_ready: false. Check Drift exposes missing mappings, stale manuscript hashes, and possible over-condensation after either source changes.

After the production project passes its exhaustive SwanSong playthrough, choose that playthrough report and select Prove Story Delivery. Story Proof checks each declared turn and consequence against the route that reached it, accepted input, reachable next state, ImageGen presentation, effective motif, presented-raster fade continuity, native audio, and captured ending where required. The generated Story Ribbon is a readable checkpoint timeline. It proves that a beat arrived in the running ROM; it does not prove that the beat is well written or replace readers and editors.

Continue in Studio only begins the actual adaptation pass. Production still requires authored VN beats and choices, approved ImageGen art, the novel revision gate, WonderSwan readiness, and exhaustive SwanSong route, save/replay, fade, and native-audio testing.

Long route matrices show a flushed route-N (current/total) line and retain wall_time_seconds for every route. The Story Forge doctor terminates the whole emulator process group on timeout, so a child player cannot survive and make a failed test look like a silent hang. Its whole-game deadline scales from the enumerated route count, within fixed safety bounds; long stories are not given the same total wall-clock allowance as four-route stories.

Catalog

Catalog Status shows every book's stage, words, scenes, reports, readers, art, stale evidence, and next useful action. Originality Audit compares copied prose and repeated premise, relationship, ending, rhythm, title, and composition defaults. Similarity is a review lead rather than an automatic plagiarism verdict.

Series Bible consolidates canon, volume promises, protected mysteries, future hooks, and continuity between books.

Publish

Rights & Release distinguishes original, fan-work, and licensed projects plus private, free-noncommercial, and commercial scope. A fan-work project cannot pass as commercial clearance; a licensed commercial release needs recorded approval. This is workflow evidence, not legal advice.

The project lock freezes the exact manuscript, framework, reports, ImageGen art, music, and publication environment. The release builder then creates deterministic EPUB and PDF editions and checks accessibility metadata, text-extraction parity, embedded fonts, every rendered PDF page, and external EPUBCheck when installed or required. Open the all-page contact sheet before approval.

Schema-v2 migration writes a separate v3 manifest by default and leaves rights, continuity, and human decisions pending.

WonderSwan handoff

After the Revision gate, Continue in Studio opens SwanSong Studio. Keep the novel's stable scene IDs in the game project and carry over causality, continuity, signature moments, relationship changes, ImageGen design rules, and soundtrack motifs. A screen adaptation may condense prose, but it must not erase the turn or consequence that made a scene necessary.

The game still passes Studio's build, deterministic SwanSong route, save/load, audio, evidence, and release gates. Novel approval does not substitute for ROM proof, and ROM proof does not substitute for novel approval.

Safety and privacy boundary

SwanSong invokes only its typed Story Forge allowlist; there is no arbitrary command field. Manuscripts, reports, role packets, maps, revisions, reader responses, research, art, music, adaptations, lockfiles, dashboards, EPUBs, and PDFs stay in the selected folders. Coarse local automation may report only whether a Story Forge project is open and can navigate to the workspace. It does not return a title, path, manuscript, report, image, music file, edition, diagnostic text, or approval record.

Story Forge never invents a human reviewer or approval and never treats programmatic art as production illustration.