Get Started

Hypstory is a tool for writers who want to create interactive text. It was made expecially for people who focus on writing instead of programming.

Creating a Hypstory can mean different things. It can mean to write a story and amplify it with a few extra lines for interactivity. It can also mean to write rich multi-threaded interactions with conditional branches, character values, randomization etc. You decide how far you want to go.

Learning Hypstory

Hypstory wants to be easy to learn and use. But where to start? There are probably a million paths when learning any new thing. For getting into Hypstory, I recommend the following three.

Three ways to start

  1. For adventurers: Create a Hypstory now with this tutorial: Write a Hypstory in 3 minutes.
  2. For the committed: A more sustainable path is to understand the basics first. Start with the article about cards and work your way through paragraphs and basic links. These three ingredients are all you need to write a Hypstory.
  3. For nerds: Read up on key concepts to penetrate Hypstory in an almost indecent fashion. After that, you will perceive this Learn Hypstory section as a collection of logically connected units rather than a book of mysteries.

Continue learning

Whichever path you choose to get started, it will ultimately lead to a point where you want to go beyond the basics. There, your next step will be to pick any feature or tutorial and get into it.

The articles about commands and features are learning paths in themselves guiding you from trivial to tricky. They cover a specific feature and tell you how it is connected to other features. Also, they contain examples for you to play with, scrutinize, and break. Because that's how we learn.

The interactive tutorials tackle practical problems of using Hypstory's features and writing interactive texts. They walk you through possible solutions step-by-step. At the end of each tutorial you will have created your own working example.

Writing Hypstories

Many people learn best by practice. If that sounds like you, why not start writing your own Hypstory? You can pick up new commands along the way when you need them.

Start writing

The write section is the best place to create a Hypstory, especially for beginners. There, you will find an editor and a preview area. Also, there are tools in place to support your writing and learning process, for example a cheatsheet that gives you a brief overview of all Hypstory commands along with links to each article.

Alternatively, you can write a Hypstory in your favorite word processor. To test it, simply copy and paste the source text into the write section editor.

Finish writing

The write section is also the place where you create a playable Hypstory file once your work is done. This file is in the HTML format and works in every browser. You can upload it to a server or into a cloud. Or you can send it via e-mail or on your favorite messaging platform.