Getting Started

What is Atlas?

Atlas is a self-service world-building tool that helps you create immersive narratives. You bring your idea for a world, characters, and plots, and we'll make it into a playable narrative role-playing game.

What do I need to make a world?

The essentials before you start: ideas, time, and a willingness to play. The more detailed and specific your setting and world ideas are, the easier it is to build a compelling world.

Atlas is simple enough that you can start from an idea, but complex enough that you can manually configure every rule or detail of how players will experience your world and characters. Technically, you can start building a world from a super-short suggestion — “peanut butter and jelly,” “cat heist,” “serial killer musical.” But if you want to invest more time (30 minutes is about right, for starters!), you can create a robust, fascinating world that’s worth getting lost in.

How does the wizard work?

Type a few sentences into our editing wizard to start. You’ll build an interactive world by choosing core elements of your player experience, including story hooks, genre and tone, maturity level, rules of physics, starting knowledge, trope pillars, character archetypes, and more. As you answer questions, your evolving vision will appear before your eyes.

How does the “start from existing writing” system work?

Paste your story excerpt, world bible, character notes, or any piece of your own writing. We’ll use it as the starting point for an interactive adaptation. We never train models on your writing. Read more in our creator Terms of Service.

Define your vision

Vision & Tone

This is how you define your creative north star. If your world were a book, what would the blurb say? If it were a movie or TV show, what would your logline be? If it were a listing on a travel website, how would you entice visitors? This is what the Vision tab captures: a few brief sentences about the world, and what it feels like to inhabit your creation. The game will use this to make sure players’ stories stay true to the mood you create.

World Settings

Here’s where you set guidelines for your world’s writing style, world-specific vocabulary, character voices, and the underlying tensions of your world.

This is also where you specify your world’s name, your display name, genre classification, tags, content rating, theme color, and world art. If you’re a creator with a following or other projects, this is also where you can promote them! In the “world links” section, you can link to your own social media, provide a shopping link to your novel, and bring players into your fandom.

Lore & Physics

This is where you really dig into the rules of your world. Okay, “rules” sounds boring. Here’s where you decide on the setting, magic systems, technology, social norms, and what players know at the start. There are a lot of options here. You can customize your world’s physics, realism, magic systems, technology rules, social norms, character death settings (do you allow zombies?), power dynamics, starting knowledge, secrets, and uncoverable mysteries.

Populate your world

Characters

Canon characters are the NPCs that populate your world. To make them feel alive, decide on their personalities, goals, relationships, secrets, and other backstory. Then, decide how the game introduces them into the story.

Plus, you also get to help your players shape their characters. Every player will create at least one main character (and some people may choose to create multiple options). What guidance do they see? What are the character concepts available to them? What kinds of questions will guide the backstory their characters have?

Locations

There is not a map, but you can give the same types of guidance as with canon characters as to when they should be introduced! This can be prose in the location editor, and you can also connect a location directly to a story hook to make sure it shows up there.

Items

Which objects and artifacts matter in your world? Create items that serve the story and give players meaningful choices. Decide how players may encounter, unlock, and use them.

Is there art?

Yes! You have access to our library of hand-drawn character and genre art. Canon characters and player characters can have access to a range of human characters and outfits for any genre or occasion. We’re working on adding playable animal avatars, too (and you might have encountered some of those animals as NPCs in our existing playable worlds).

You can also bring your own art to the platform. We enable URL links to custom art for canon characters, locations, and items, as well as the world art your player base sees when they enter your creation.

Publishing

How do I publish my world?

After a world is published, you can choose if a world is listed (publicly discoverable!) or unlisted (only available to people with the exact URL).

Monetization

How does pricing work?

You can read a full breakdown in our subscription FAQ.

Do you pay creators?

We sure do. We’re proud to say that 30% of all subscription revenue goes straight back to world creators, with revenue share based on player interaction metrics. We believe writers and artists should get paid!

What is your partner program?

If accepted into Hidden Door’s partner program, we’ll grant you complimentary access to our Atlas worldbuilding tool, include you in our revenue share program, and promote the heck out of your stuff. We’re looking for creators who want to introduce their worlds to a new audience or find a new way to engage with existing fans. If you’re a novelist, RPG module writer, forever DM, fanfic author, fancam maker, screenwriter, serial publisher, or other kind of creator, we’re looking for you. Apply right here.

Philosophy

Do you train AI on my writing?

No! We don’t train AI models on your writing, and we never will. We love human creativity. We give humans tools to create story beats, plot tropes, character archetypes, avatar art, and location art that you encounter. Then, machine learning tasks combine those pieces.

We use machine learning to combine human-crafted elements in an interactive framework. We use LLMs for tasks they’re good at, like combining tropes from a bunch of different modifier cards, or recognizing which avatar components best fit the character you’re trying to create. We do not use AI to scrape or “harvest” your work.

Do I retain ownership of my IP?

You retain the rights to all original IP that you bring to the platform. We want you to be successful with your work everywhere you go! You can read more in our Terms of Service, Creator Terms of Service, and Subscriber Terms of Service.

We're still building these out. Please do let us know in Discord or at creators@hiddendoor.co if you have any questions or comments!