I discovered Narrat around 5 days ago, and have been spending a few hours with it each day since and it has not been going well. The first 3 days I soend trying to simply create and open a project, then 4th was spent trying to get the play test window to open.
Today I finally started to try and edit the script and the whole thing no longer runs, just a white screen in playtest. I am a complete beginner, so I am not ruling out the possibility that I have made mistakes simply because I don’t have any base knowledge in this field but I seem to be having many issues with the engine.
It is really complicated to set up, requiring multiple programs, many of which need to be tinkered with to work and apparently sometimes they just don’t, which doesn’t seem very beginner friendly.
The scripting process seems easy to learn but navigating the website to find specific pieces of information is tricky. It’s format is a little strange, and finding where to start after getting it running is confusing as it throws so much non-beginner information at you at the beginning.
It is giving me errors in code I haven’t even touched. I have no clue what some of these files do yet, and I open it up to find they have errors before I’ve even gotten to look around the demo code.
Once again, this may be due to my complete inexperience!
I just think the instructional pages are confusing to navigate and understand for a beginner. And the whole engine is super difficult to get my head around when I chose to give this a go as it said it was beginner friendly.
I am going to keep persevering, however I do think that the phrasing on the website might need to be changed (since as a beginner I’m not yet finding it friendly), or there needs to be clearer instructions for those who are complete beginners.
Thanks for reading, I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative. I just wanted to voice my current concerns and I hope to eventually figure this engine out and prove myself wrong
Most of the technically complicated stuff is caused by the fact that node npm etc are a bit messy and inherently require using the terminal, among other things. But also lots of people have installed those things just following the normal instructions and it works fine. I think there might be some default security settings depending on machines that can get in the way of things working
But the benefit you get from that is that it uses very standard tools and you’re in control of the application itself and the code. Rather than having a more limited premade thing. And then you can export to any platform, and you can also modify that setup to do what you want if needed.
Another thing more generally is that making games involves digging into technical things one way or another, simple tools that don’t require figuring out tech stuff will be very limited.
Also, it’s a small open source engine with no budget. A lot of those issues could be solved with better docs, time to make an editor or some tool that automates installation and creation of projects etc. But hobbyist tools rarely get the chance to get polished because there’s no budget and I don’t work full time on it
Also for the specific problems, without seeing logs of the terminal, and browser devtools, and what the errors are and where etc, it’s hard to say. People need info to diagnose issues
I’d say you’re picking up on something real. Narrat’s documentation is solid, but there’s definitely a gap between “hello world” and actually shipping something meaningful.
The framework handles the visual novel/dialogue-heavy stuff intuitively—that part is genuinely beginner-friendly. But once you move past basic conversation trees, things get choppy. The scripting language has its own quirks that aren’t immediately obvious from the tutorials. Variables and state management work differently than you’d expect if you’re coming from traditional game engines, and the docs don’t always explain the “why” behind those design choices.
A few concrete friction points I’ve noticed in threads here:
The learning curve for custom components isn’t gentle. You need to understand both Narrat’s API and Vue fundamentals simultaneously, which is rough if you’re new to both.
Debugging can be tedious. Error messages sometimes point you in the general direction rather than the exact problem.
Conditional branching syntax requires more boilerplate than you’d hope for.
That said, it depends on your background. If you’ve done any scripting before, you’ll adapt faster. The community here is helpful too—people generally respond well to specific questions.
My suggestion: set a realistic first project scope. Build something with 3-4 scenes max, keep mechanics simple, and use that to build intuition. Then your second project will feel much less opaque. The framework isn’t poorly designed, but it’s targeting people with at least some game dev exposure.
tbh the issue here is that ideally someone should only use what’s built-in. Once you get into making custom vue components, you’re basically doing web development. And you can do that, but it’s obviously advanced use. Which is fine if you’re on a serious project where you have very specific goals and are willing to learn new things to do it, but once you reach that point you’re on your own.
Generally I don’t know where the bar should be between things being easy vs giving people ways to break things and do super custom stuff because, people will always want to do more things than what’s possible, and eventually that adds more complexity over time.
I think there’s also a thing where like in extreme cases, for some people it could make more sense to simply make a game from scratch in a normal game engine.
Constraints are good to keep people focused, but there’s a whole range of things that people might want to do in their games and eventually it’s impossible to hide the technical details.
