Authoring

Short answer: You do not need a separate dry-run render to find out what voice will cost - the cost of using voice is surfaced to you before any spend is committed, so you can review the charge and decide whether to proceed without first tr

Short answer: Yes - bring-your-own voice acting is a planned first-class path. You won't be limited to the built-in synthetic voice archetypes (powered by Chatterbox); you'll be able to upload your own recorded performances and attach them

Short answer: At launch, each project on Vizno has a single owner - there is no way to add a second creator as a co-creator or co-owner of the same project. Multi-creator collaboration is planned for a future release, but no date has been c

Yes - pop the Stage, the Script editor, the Story Map, or a separate Preview into its own browser window. The main Forge tab stays in charge, and pop-outs stay live and in sync with your selections, playhead, and edits.

Short answer: You retain a license to AI-generated assets you create within your project, but Vizno reserves limited use rights over those assets. This means you are not the sole, unrestricted owner - Vizno holds certain rights to the AI-ge

Episodes are your story's chapters - ordered groups of scenes shown as brackets in the bar under the Stage. Create, rename, reorder, and gate them right in that bar; readers reaching an episode's end see a card that continues, offers the next episode, or closes out the story.

Paywalls are ordinary events inserted from the Monetize section of Forge's insert palette, and the timeline card shows exactly what's attached - the offer and its price. Tips are no longer story events; readers send them from the player's support surfaces. Members-only access is a setting on an episode, scene, or choice option. A practice mode on the editing Stage lets you run your own gates without spending anything real.

Select the when event and use its editor: '+ Add else-when branch' adds another condition that is tested only if the ones above failed, and '+ Add otherwise branch' adds a final else that runs when every condition fails. The chain checks top to bottom and plays the first branch that passes.

Hover between two rows in the timeline and a + appears; click it to open the insert palette - 39 verbs in 11 searchable categories with a recently-used row. Picking a verb inserts a working event on the spot and opens its editor; media verbs open the asset picker first, and verbs that need something you don't have yet create it for you inline.

Add a Particles event and pick one of 15 built-in presets - from rain and snow to fireflies and confetti. Tune the intensity and look, aim the stream at the stage, the background, or a named character, and it runs until you stop it or the scene changes. No image files needed.

Routes are edited where they live - on the event itself, in the inspector, or as text in Script view. The Story Map is how you find the route you want to change and check the result: click a card to go there, isolate a route to see how a reader reaches an ending, and read the issue list for arrows that point nowhere.

Right-click an event and choose Delete (or use Delete in its editor). Forge asks you to confirm - a setting can turn that off per browser - and always removes whole structures cleanly: deleting a choice or a when block takes its contents with it, and Undo restores anything you deleted.

The Menu view in Forge is a title-screen editor: place your background, title, decorative layers, and the five menu buttons freely on a canvas, then choreograph the intro on a timeline - every element gets its own entrance, timing, and idle motion. Nine ready-made presets ship with their own music, and a keep-my-content option applies a preset's motion to your own art.

In Forge, the Stage is the real running game, not a preview. Click any event to see exactly that moment, edit lines and characters right on the frame, and every change applies on its own about half a second after you stop typing - Undo takes it back.

Switch to the Script view in Forge's top bar. Each scene gets its own text editor with a scene list on the left, autocomplete for every verb, hover help, project-wide rename, and problems flagged as you type. Edits save automatically - text and timeline are two views of the same story.

A sprite's first appearance can fire one entrance effect - pop, grow, bounce, nod, headshake, flinch, perk, slump, shake, or punch - set per sprite in the Sprites dock, with per-show overrides. Ren'Py imports start with entrances off so the imported game looks exactly like the original.

Click any event in the timeline and the stage renders exactly that moment - no replaying from the start. This works for every kind of event, even silent ones, and the playhead never refuses a click.

Idle motion gives standing sprites ambient life - gentle breathing and head sway with feet planted. Pick one of five profiles per sprite in the Sprites dock (relaxed, quick, heavy, exhausted, or none), or switch profiles mid-story with a Sprite: Motion event.

The Assets tab of the Forge dock is a full asset manager inside the editor: browse, search, upload, rename, and organize your images, audio, and video without leaving the Stage - with each of your projects as a top-level folder plus a shared library pool. The same library opens whenever a media event asks you to pick an asset.

Only a Move event changes where a sprite sits, how big it is, or how it's rotated - showing a sprite never carries a position. The fastest way to place a character is to drag them on the Stage; Forge writes the position into the Move event next to the show, creating one if needed.

Click any event inside a choice option and Forge acts as if the reader picked that option - the stage sets itself up the way that branch looks, the rest of the option plays, and its ending jump fires normally. Works both Paused and Live.

Open the Launch menu at the top right of Forge and choose Preview. It starts a clean run of your game from the very beginning, exactly as a reader would see it, in its own throwaway save slot - your editing position is untouched. Press Esc to return to editing.

Drag rows to reorder them - indentation adjusts itself so structure stays valid. Right-click any event for Copy, Paste below, Add to group, and Delete; Ctrl/Cmd-click to select several (or Shift-click to select a range) and act on them together; drag events onto a scene card in the bottom strip to move them to that scene.

Use Start over in the top bar's playback control (behind a confirm). It returns the running game to your story's starting scene and resets every story variable to its default - the only action that resets variables. Preview in the Launch menu always starts a clean run too.

Open the Theme view in Forge and click the actual element - textbox, name box, dialogue text, choice buttons, or continue indicator - on a live preview to restyle it. Drag to reposition, resize with edge grips, start from one of 12 built-in themes (all fully editable), add image skins and custom fonts, and export the result as a file.

Open the Launch menu in Forge and press Share to get a link anyone with a Vizno account can open and play in the browser. The link serves a frozen snapshot from the moment you pressed Share and lasts 10 days from your last Share press - press Share again to update and renew it, Stop sharing to kill it instantly, or Reset link to move it to a new address.

The Camera event's Shot pans and zooms the whole stage in one smooth move, aimed on a small widescreen framing pad - the rectangle you drag is exactly what the reader will see, on every screen size. The same event also offers simpler Pan, Zoom, and Ken Burns moves.

Click a dialogue line on the Stage and type into the real textbox - real font, live formatting, no raw formatting codes. Enter saves the line and opens a fresh one so you keep writing; the speaker control above the box switches between narration, a cast member, or a custom name with its own namebox color.

The strip along the bottom of Forge shows every scene as a card. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) and scroll to zoom around your cursor, scroll normally to pan sideways, and drag the strip's top edge to change its height. Zoomed all the way out it becomes a read-only overview of the whole story.

Style effects persist: a blur or color grade stays applied until you turn it off, unlike one-shot moments like a shake or flash. The Style event's Apply / Clear switch sets or removes the look, and any persistent style ends automatically when the scene changes.

A Move event can change any mix of a sprite's position, size, rotation, anchor, and layer order - anything left blank keeps its current value. Position, size, and rotation each animate on their own curve and duration, chosen from eight motion curves, or snap instantly.

Declare a variable once in the Variables tab of the Forge dock - a name plus a type (number, text, or yes/no) - and every `set` and `when` event lets you pick it from a list instead of typing it. Each row also shows the variable's live value at the current moment of the story, so you can test values without playing from the start.

Those are Signals - small colored cues beside the Forge dock showing what is active at the current moment of the story: violet for effects, blue for sprites, amber for logic, green for audio. Click one to see the cues and jump to the event that caused each; right-click dismisses a cue, and Settings can mute any category.

Forge is one workspace with four ways of looking at your story, switched from the top bar: Stage shows the running game as your editing canvas, Story Map shows the whole project as a flowchart, Script shows the story as text, and Split shows the Stage plus a drawer holding Script or the Story Map. Switching views never loses your place.

The gear in Forge's top bar opens settings that affect only you as the author - interface preferences and your personal playback experience while editing. Nothing in this dialog ever changes what readers see; reader-facing settings live on the project's Settings page.

Short answer: When you start a fresh project (rather than importing a Ren'Py one), you pick one of two starting templates. Blank gives you a single scene with one backdrop and one narration line - just enough to open and play. Basic sample

Forge no longer has a Backdrop panel. The space behind and around your stage art is always plain black, with nothing to configure. To give a scene a flat color look, set a Background event to a solid color; to control how off-size art fills the frame, use the Background event's Framing setting. The Theme view still styles the reading UI.

Live plays your game normally while you edit. Paused freezes forward progression - clicks, Enter, timed pauses, choices, and video advance all hold - so you can work on a frozen frame; music keeps looping, and resuming continues from wherever you parked.

Forge is the workspace where you build your visual novel inside the running game. The Stage - the live game itself - is the default editing view, joined by Script, Story Map, and Split views plus editors for your reader theme and title screen, all in the browser with nothing to install.

Right-click a background event and choose Add camera move: Forge splices a framed zoom, a dissolve on the background change, and a gentle drift across the backdrop - a one-click cinematic opening for a new location, inserted as ordinary events you can edit or delete individually.

The Problems tab of the Forge dock collects every issue in your project in one list - grouped by scene or by type, filterable by severity, written in plain language. Warnings never stop you; rows that would block saving or publishing say so explicitly, and every row jumps straight to the event or script line that caused it.

While a character speaks, their sprite eases slightly forward and brightens while everyone else recedes and dims - automatically, with no events to author. Two switches in the Sprites dock settings control how Forge matches sprites to speakers; Ren'Py imports start with the spotlight off.

The Sprite Manager is the Sprites tab in Forge's right-side dock - the library of every sprite your project defines. Each sprite holds its frames, default position, entrance, idle motion, and layer order, plus an optional cast link; the panel adds folders, search, three views, and bulk editing.

The Story Map is your whole project drawn as a flowchart of scene cards with arrows for every way the story routes. It opens with scenes running left to right and episodes as stacked rows, and three toggles - Episodes: rows or columns, Scenes: across or down, and Wrap: groups or one line - let you arrange it to suit your screen. Filters, an isolate picker and a beat lens answer where you are, what a scene contains, and what is broken.

Forge keeps shortcuts small and surface-specific: Ctrl/Cmd+B toggles the navigation rail and Esc closes overlays or exits Preview anywhere; writing on the Stage, the Script view, the timeline, and the title-screen editor each add a few of their own.

Forge ships a closed catalog of 23 named effects, grouped in the palette into four families: Animate (one-shot moments), Style (persistent looks), Particles (15 presets), and Camera. Crossfades like dissolve and fade attach to background or sprite changes as transitions; there is no custom-effect scripting.

Short answer: Voice is not yet available for use in projects - the feature is still being built. It will be ready before Vizno launches publicly, so you will be able to use voice in your project by the time the platform goes live.

It's deliberate - imported Ren'Py projects start with Vizno's ambient extras (speaker spotlight and entrance animations) switched off so your game looks exactly like the original. Turn them on any time from the Sprites dock settings; it's fully reversible.

Forge saves for you. Edits apply themselves about half a second after you stop typing, or when you press Enter or click away; invalid values are held - never saved - until fixed. The top-bar indicator shows saving, saved, and error states, and Undo steps back.