A No-Code Fully-Featured 2D Game Engine

Story Machine is an visual editor and engine for 2D games and interactive stories. Build games simply and easily for Mac, Windows, Linux, Nintendo Switch, and the web.

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The Story Machine editor with a card game open: the stage in the middle, action editors, the text database, and a debug log

Games made in Story Machine

Beacon's Bluff

Seeing Things

Suspicious Holes

Visual and direct

A simple, drag and drop interface lets you compose scenes quickly and easily.

Direct scene manipulation: quickly and easily arrange a scene
Instant preview: run your game in Play mode, and modify it on the fly.
Plug and play: add components to your objects to give them life

Core concepts

Logic without code

Drive your game logic through sequences of commands, no programming required.

More than fifty actions for everything from animation to save games
Create complex sequences without node-graph spaghetti
Solve bugs with robust breakpoint and logging tools

Events and actions

Packed with features

Action sequences

Build logic by stacking actions. No programming language required.

Branching dialog

Built-in support for branching dialog sequences with logic and variables.

Sprite animation

Slice sprite sheets, sequence frames, and add events. Aseprite support.

Text effects

Rich formatting, wrapping, drop shadows, outlines, pagination, and much more.

Regions and hit boxes

Draw clickable areas of any shape directly.

Simple localization

All of a game's text in one place, with built-in localization tools.

Particles

Fire, smoke, sparks, rain, and magic and more.

Physics

Collision, constraints, and raycasts, all in a simple package.

Full screen effect layers

Stackable post effects: bloom, blur, color grading, and many more.

Background removal

Custom algorithm to easily remove background colors without leaving ugly outlines.

Dialog flow

Write conversations like a film script and play them as fully staged scenes.

Make anything

Story Machine is designed to support just about any kind of 2D video game.

Cross platform

Build games for Windows, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, and the web.

Full Steam support

Story Machine games run on Steam Deck and integrate the Steamworks SDK.

Deploy instantly

Instantly deploy your game to storymachines.net and play it in a browser.

Flipbooks

Custom video format for complex animated sequences with transparency.

Networking

Create multiplayer games and test them locally using multiple player instances.

Sound and music

Support for wav, mp3, and flac.

Achievements

Seamless integration with host platforms.

Simple input

Configureable controller mappings as well as keyboard, mouse, and touch screen support.

Story Machine Discord

Story Machine is in beta. Join the community to get builds, ask questions, share what you are making, and see what is coming next.

Join the Discord