Hundreds of NPCs. Branching questlines. One narrative truth.

How game studios use PlotLens

Read this section knowing what it is not. PlotLens ships no game-specific feature: no dialogue-tree importer, no quest-graph model, no engine plugin, and no entity type beyond the six it extracts from any manuscript. What a narrative team gets is the general system — a project per story world, a Story Bible derived from the text, roles across a team, and a branch-aware timeline — described here in the terms a game team would use it in, and nothing more. Your Story Bible is the set of facts your story has established — what readers call canon.

1. 1

   One project per story world

   A project owns its own documents, story elements, established facts, timeline and Manuscript Check sessions, and deleting it cascades to all of them. That is the unit of isolation: separate titles, or separate worlds inside a franchise, stay separate because they are separate projects.

2. 2

   Upload narrative text in the formats that exist

   PlotLens parses .txt, .md, .docx, .pdf, .rtf, .odt, .epub and .fountain. There is no importer for engine-native dialogue or quest data, so narrative that lives in a proprietary format has to be exported to one of those eight first.

3. 3

   Extract the six entity types

   Extraction returns characters, locations, events, items, organizations and concepts — the same six for a game script as for a novel — each with source attestations and a confidence score. Duplicates merge automatically above 0.9 confidence and go to a reversible review queue below it.

4. 4

   Model branching narrative on the timeline

   The timeline’s Branches view is a multi-lane flow graph for parallel and alternate storylines, each branch carrying a name, a colour and an optional parent branch. Events are added manually — nothing is auto-extracted into the timeline — and validation findings can carry branch-incompatible and branch_sibling reason codes.

5. 5

   Check what a character is allowed to know

   POV-scoped validation checks text against what a specific character actually knows rather than what is true in the world, and reports knowledge violations where a character acts on something they should not know. Each character holds one of four belief statuses per fact: believes-true, believes-false, unaware or suspects. Available on Plus and above.

6. 6

   Put the narrative team on one team-owned project

   Collaboration is team membership on a team-owned project, with four roles: one owner, admins who manage membership, editors who read and write, and viewers who read. Studio covers 5 to 50 seats and Production 10 to 100, with daily fair-use ceilings of 1,000 and 3,000 validations respectively.