Tutorial 2 — A Personalized Adventure

Now you’ll make the story feel personal: ask the reader their name, remember it, and greet them by it later. This introduces variables and the User Input block.

What you’ll use: a variable, a User Input block, and {{variable}} placeholders.

Start a new story

Create a story called The Innkeeper (category: Fantasy or Adventure). You’ll have one empty block to begin.

Create a variable to hold the name

Open the Variables tab on the right and click + Create variable:

Name: name
Type: string (text)

That’s it — the variable starts as empty text and will hold whatever the reader types.

Ask for the name with a User Input block

You want the reader’s name before you greet them, so this block should come first. Add a User Input block from the toolbar and set:

text: Welcome to the Prancing Pony! What should I call you, traveler?
hint: Enter your name…
save_to: name

Select this block and click Set as start so it’s the first thing the reader sees. The reader’s typed answer will be stored in the name variable.

Greet them by name with a Text block

Add a Text block and set its text to:

A pleasure, {{name}}. Take a seat by the fire — the stew’s hot and the stories are free tonight.

The {{name}} placeholder is replaced with whatever the reader entered. While editing, it shows blue if the variable name matches (here, name) and red if it’s misspelled.

The placeholder must match the variable’s name exactly — {{name}}, not {{Name}} or {{names}}. A red placeholder means Skaz can’t find a variable by that name.

Connect them

Select the User Input block, open Branching, click + Add choice, and connect it to the greeting Text block. A User Input block only needs one choice — the reader continues after they submit their answer. (You can label it Continue.)

Add an ending

Add one more Text block — You settle in for the night. The End. — and connect a choice from the greeting block to it. Leave this last block with no choices so it acts as the ending.

Preview it

Open the preview, type a name into the input field, and continue. Confirm the next screen greets you by the exact name you typed.

What you learned

Variables remember values across the whole playthrough.
A User Input block asks a question and saves the answer into a variable via save_to.
{{variable}} in any text is replaced with the variable’s current value.

In Tutorial 3 you’ll track a number that goes up and down as the reader plays, then branch to different endings based on the final score.