Preview
Play your draft from any scene without publishing, and poke at the variables while it runs.
Preview runs the real player against an in-memory compile of your draft. Nothing is stored, nothing is served, no version is minted, and no play is counted against your plan.
Play from here
Open the scene you want to start from, then press Play from here in the
editor header. If the header is cramped, press Ctrl K (⌘ K on a Mac)
and run "Play from here".
The button is disabled until a scene is open. The preview starts on that scene, not at the story's start scene, so you can jump straight to the branch you are working on.
The preview takes over the center of the editor. A bar across the top says
Preview and names where you started, and Close puts the script back.
What the compiler allows here
A preview compiles in draft mode. Exactly one rule is waived: a scene that can end the story without naming an ending is fine in a preview and fatal at publish. Everything else (undeclared variables, broken conditions, duplicate ids, choices routed nowhere) still stops the preview and opens a dialog listing the problems. Click a problem to land on the offending beat.
Assets are fetched at the moment you click, so something you uploaded a second ago validates.
A preview compiles the open chapter only. An edge that leaves for another chapter routes to a stub scene called "Continues in another chapter", which prints a line saying so and stops. To test a cross-chapter jump, publish and play the share link.
If the dialog says the story "couldn't be read for preview" and calls itself a bug, it is one. That message means extraction fell over, not that you wrote something wrong.
Overriding variables while it runs
The right dock grows a Preview tab while a preview is open. It lists every variable the story declares, with a control matched to its type, and setting one patches the running state immediately. The HUD, condition-gated choices and condition-gated edges all recompute off the new value.
That is the fast way to reach a branch that would otherwise need ten minutes of
correct play: set trust to 4, take the choice, watch what happens.
Controls
The on-canvas control strip carries Skip (S) and Auto-advance (A).
Save and Menu are missing on purpose: a preview has nothing to save to.
Advance with Space, Enter or a click on the dialogue box. Clicking while a
line is still typing reveals the rest of it; the next click moves on. Number
keys 1 to 9 take the matching choice.
What preview does not do
- No saves, no autosave, no save slots.
- No endings gallery, and reaching an ending does not unlock anything.
- No age confirmation, even on a story flagged mature.
- No play counted, no "Made with Narratomi" badge decision.
So a branch that only appears once a persistent unlock is set will not appear in a preview unless you set the variable yourself in the Preview tab.
When you are ready
Preview proves the scene plays. It does not prove the story ships: the endings rule only bites at publish time. Read Publish and versions next.