STORY MODE

A book you open.

Two people walk a dirt road at sunrise and find a stone, a coin, and a signpost carrying marks they cannot read and recognize anyway. It is not finished. It is not going to be — new pages arrive from other hands.

== WHAT IT IS ==

STORY MODE is a pixel storybook that behaves like a book.

It has a leather cover with raised spine ribs that folds open when you touch it. Paper with real grain. A gutter where the page curls into the spine. A corner that dog-ears as you read, and gets more worn on pages you have already been to. 

The book it opens is SUPER ADVENTURE MEGA QUEST, a quiet story about two people walking a road at first light, and what they keep noticing.

== WHAT YOU DO ==

Read it. Swipe, tap the margin, or use the arrow keys. Then read it again, because things are hidden in the pictures. Most give you a line of writing. A few give you something you can keep. Your pocket holds seven things. Six of them exist. The seventh is described only as "the other one", and no page in the book gives it to you yet.

== WHAT IT REMEMBERS ==

Every motif in the story has a mark of its own, generated from the word itself. When a page carries something you already met somewhere earlier, its mark answers, and tells you where you saw it.

The map is the road. It is dark until you walk it, and it draws itself behind you.

The lines you find gather into something that reads like a fragment of the book rather than a list of trophies.

== IT IS NOT FINISHED ==

This is a community-authored manuscript. There is a Workshop inside it: drop in a picture, write a hundred words, tag it, see it rendered in the actual book, and send it in.

Every page is read before it joins the story. Nothing publishes itself.

Contributors are listed in order of first appearance, permanently, and never by how many pages they have written. It is not a contest. It is a lineage.

== HOW TO READ ==

Swipe or tap the outer edge of a page to turn it. Arrow keys work too.

Tap the pocket on the cover board for what you are carrying, the appendix, and the map.

Tap a mark in the page footer to see where you met it before.

Turn back from the first page to close the book.

No scores. No timers. No percentage complete. Nothing to finish.

A HAFFNERVISION joint.

Written, drawn and built by Grant Haffner, with pages from other hands.

Every mark in the interface is drawn in code — the leather, the paper grain, the sigils, the map, the sprites. There is not one interface image file in the whole thing.

Sound is synthesised in the browser. Typeface is Press Start 2P (SIL Open Font License), embedded.