Short answer: The gear in Forge's top bar opens the settings dialog, and everything in it affects only you as the author - never your readers. It covers your interface preferences (tooltips, delete confirmations, which Signals you hear about) and your personal playback experience while editing. Settings that readers actually experience - save behavior, skip policy, reader defaults, your game's look - live on the project's Settings page outside Forge.
The rule: author-only
Nothing in this dialog touches your published or shared game. It's your workspace, so tune it freely - readers will never notice.
General
Your interface preferences:
- Hide tooltips if you know your way around and want less chrome.
- Confirm before deleting events (on by default) - governs the Delete action on the timeline.
- Signals - choose which categories of Signals nudges to mute.
Playback
Your own in-editor playback experience on the Stage: audio volumes, text-reveal sounds, text size, skip behavior, auto-advance, voice playback, captions, and reduce motion. These are the same kinds of knobs a reader can set for themselves in the player, but yours are kept completely separate - they shape only your editing sessions on this device, never a reader's defaults.
What's not here
- Reader-facing settings - save behavior, skip policy, reader playback defaults, and your game's presentation - live on the project's Settings page, outside Forge.
- Defaults for new sprites (entrance animation, idle motion) live in the Sprites dock: open the cog in its toolbar.
- Payment-gate testing - practice purchases and clearing your test buys happen on the project's Monetization page and the Stage itself, not in this dialog. See the payment events article below.