What is Sharpee?

Sharpee is a parser interactive fiction platform written in TypeScript. It is the engine that runs every Chord story, and it is a complete authoring surface in its own right for anyone who would rather write code.

If you are here to write a story, you probably want Chord and can stop reading after the next section. If you want to know what is actually running your story, or you intend to author in TypeScript, read on.

One engine, two surfaces

A Chord .story file compiles to a story IR, and the story loader turns that IR into entities, traits, phrases, and wiring. A TypeScript story builds those same things directly against the API. Either way the same engine runs the game.

Chord is not a restricted subset. The two surfaces aim for full parity: what you can express in one, you can express in the other. Chord trades direct access for compile-time checking; TypeScript trades checking for direct access. Mixing them in one story is expected, not a fallback.

What you get

Two of those deserve a word, because they are the unusual ones.

The engine and standard library never emit English. Not a single string. Everything a player reads comes from the language layer through a message ID, which is what makes localization a matter of adding a language package rather than auditing the codebase for hardcoded prose.

Stories do not print — they emit. A story sends structured data on named channels, and something else decides how that becomes an interface. This is why the same story can drive a terminal, the browser client, or an interface you write yourself, and why an author can restyle or replace any part of the presentation without touching story logic.

Actions are four-phase

Every action in the standard library splits into validate, execute, report, and blocked. Validation decides whether the action can happen, execution mutates the world, reporting turns what happened into events, and blocked explains a refusal. The split is what lets a story intervene at exactly one point — refuse an action, change what it reports — without reimplementing the rest of it.

Verbs whose meaning depends on the object (turn, lower, wave) dispatch to behaviors registered by traits, rather than accumulating branches inside one handler.

Practical details

Sharpee is open source under the MIT license, published to npm under the @sharpee scope, and developed on GitHub. It runs anywhere Node runs. Stories build to a self-contained browser bundle that you host or hand out directly; players need only a browser.

Where to go next