Special Topics

In this section:

• Empty and Not-Quite-Empty Steps
• Metadata
• Comments and Instructions

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Sometimes you want to create a step where nothing happens. In stories with multiple characters and/or sequences, however, Stepworks assumes that an empty step signifies the end of a sequence. So you do you let Stepworks know the difference between a non-step, and a step where nothing happens?

Simple: by adding a single space to the cell in the spreadsheet where you want the empty step to occur. This tells Stepworks to create a “nothing” step instead of assuming that the end of the current sequence has been reached. It can be helpful to assign these “nothing” cells a different color in your spreadsheet, so you can distinguish them from plain empty cells.

Note that a “nothing” step will leave visible whatever text was last displayed for the current character. If you want to “clear” the text for the current character, enter two spaces into the cell. Instead of a “nothing” step, this will result in a step in which the character literally says a space, which will clear any previous text.

In a story with no explicitly defined sequences, all steps for all characters are combined into a single sequence that loops when the last utterance is spoken by any of the characters.

You can provide metadata about your story by adding a column called “Metadata”. In the first cell below the column title, you can enter metadata in the following format:

title:[title], description:[description], primaryCredits:[primary credits], secondaryCredits:[secondary credits], version:[version], pulse:[beats per minute]/[pulses per beat]

These items can be in any order, and all are optional. You can enclose the content for a given item in quotes to protect special characters like colons and commas, like so:

title: “A title, with a comma in it”, description:A story the title of which has a comma but the description of which does not

Note that any columns titled “Comments” or “Instructions” will be ignored, so you can safely put any notes or additional information there.