Project templates
The five cards in the New project dialog, what each one puts in your project, and which to pick.
Every project starts from a template. The New project dialog asks for a name and shows five cards; the card itself is the submit button, so clicking one names and creates the project in a single move. Copying a story takes a moment, and the dialog shows a progress indicator while it writes.
Templates are a starting point, not a mode. A copied story is yours: rename it, gut it, publish it. Nothing about it stays linked to the original.
The five cards
Curtain
The default, and the first card in the grid. The flagship staged story: an understudy, a ghost light, and one opening night. Two chapters, two VRM characters on a committed theater set, two hidden flags the story reads back, and four endings.
Pick this to see the staged shape at full depth — choices that remember, an audio plan per ending — in a story meant to be read as fiction.
Sample story
A short, complete, playable story in the classic staged shape.
You get two chapters (The Night Market and The Gate), a small cast (Mira and
Juno, with avatars and a dialogue blip), three project variables (coins,
trust, toldTruth), a HUD with a meter and a counter, music and sound effect
stage directions, choices with both inline and edge routes, locked options, and
two endings.
Pick this if you want something that already works and want to read how it was built. It is publishable as it stands.
Blank
One chapter, no scenes, no cast, no variables. You write everything.
Pick this when you know what you are making. Also the right pick for following the quick start, because an empty project does not distract.
A blank project is genuinely blank on purpose. Narratomi resolves the story start as the first scene of the first chapter, so a seeded starter scene would quietly become every new story's opening, and an unmarked dead end that blocks publish.
Adrift
A cinematic sci-fi short where every scene is an AI-generated video clip played as a Hold: the clip gates the script until it finishes, and narration rides over the frozen last frame. Two chapters, ten clips, a diamond-shaped graph where two branches re-merge, and three endings, one of which you only reach if you never touched the beacon.
Pick this if you are building a film-shaped story rather than a staged one.
Duel
The second cinematic sample: an anime action short, two masked duellists on a neon rooftop. Same shape as Adrift, with ten clips and a looping rain bed that carries across every cut. Three endings; the third is a choice option gated on a condition, so it appears only if you never drew first.
Pick this to study cinematic pacing, or the trick of running one continuous ambient track under clips that are otherwise silent.
Which to pick
| If you want to | Pick |
|---|---|
| See the staged shape at full depth | Curtain |
| Learn by reading a short working story | Sample story |
| Start writing immediately | Blank |
| Make a video-driven story | Adrift or Duel |
When it goes wrong
If the copy fails partway, the project is still created, just blank, and the projects page shows an error. Delete it and try again, or keep it and write in it: a failed copy leaves nothing broken behind.
Curtain and the cinematic templates lean on built-in media that ships with the studio. On a self-hosted install where the starter packs were never seeded, those cards fail to copy for that reason. The Blank card always works.
On the Free plan you can own two projects at once, so a spare template copy costs you one of them. Delete copies you are done reading.