Skip to content

Build a Universe - the writer's walkthrough

This walkthrough is for science fiction writers, not programmers. If you can write a series bible - the factions, the places, the people, the story - you can build a playable galaxy for the Open Universe. Everything you will write is plain text in one file. There is no code in this walkthrough. There is no code in your universe.

You do not need to read the whole thing. Each page adds one idea, the universe is playable after every page, and you can stop at any point and have a finished galaxy. When you want exact label lists instead of a tour, see the reference.

What we build: a small frontier galaxy called The Silver Reach - two factions, honest work, a three-chapter story, a war to win, and a pirate captain who holds a grudge. The finished file is on the complete example page - and it ships with the mission, playable from the Universe dropdown right now.

Before you start: three ground rules

  1. Write in a plain-text editor - Notepad, VS Code, Sublime, anything that saves .amd files as plain text. Do not draft in Microsoft Word: Word silently replaces straight quotes with curly ones and hyphens with long dashes, and the game can only display plain keyboard characters. If a line looks right but behaves wrong, this is the first thing to check.

  2. Lines starting with // are notes to yourself. The game skips them. Use them freely.

  3. Everything is optional except the title. Every rule, dial, and section you do not write falls back to a sensible built-in. You never have to configure anything to get started - you only write the parts you care about.

The shape of the file (learn this once)

Your whole universe is one .amd file, and every piece of it - a faction, a job, a chapter of story - has the same three-part shape:

### The Red Veil (veil)          <- a heading: a NAME and a (key)
---                              <- a fence: 3 dashes on their own line
Color: #cc2244                   <- the fact sheet: one fact per line
Disposition: foe
---                              <- the closing fence
Corsairs of the outer dark.      <- the prose: what players read
They take what the light forgets.
  • The heading names the thing. The part in (...) is its key - a short one-word nickname, lowercase, no spaces. Other lines refer to it by this key, the way a screenplay refers to INT. BRIDGE after introducing it once. Keys must be unique.
  • The fence holds the fact sheet: Label: value, one per line, like the header of a character sheet. Skip any fact you don't care about.
  • The prose is yours. Everything under the fence that isn't a heading is description - the flavor text players actually read. This is where you write.

The number of # marks is the outline level, exactly like headings in a document: # is the universe itself, ## is a chapter (Clans, Jobs, Story...), ### is one entry in that chapter.

That is the entire format. Everything from here on is just what to write.

Next: Getting started - hang your universe on the shelf and give it a name.