8 steps

A story that holds together

For: Any game with scenes, choices or characters, before it has many of them.

Plot holes are not a writing problem, they are a bookkeeping problem: who is alive, who knows what, what has happened. Write the facts down first, then let your AI check every path instead of reading carefully.

The steps, in order

1
Story help
What Is a Story Bible, and How Does Your AI Use It?
A story bible is one file with your characters, world, timeline and rules. Your AI builds a model from it and a checker walks every path against it.
Why here: Everything else rests on this: an AI forgets, a bible does not. Write it before the second scene exists.
2
Story help
How to Make a Game Story Without Errors or Plot Holes
Have your AI model your story and run a checker over every path. It names the exact scenes that break a rule, so you fix real errors, not guesses.
Why here: Learn what a plot hole is in terms of facts and scenes, so you can see them as data your AI can check.
3
Code recipe
Plot hole finder
Your AI writes your story down as plain facts, scenes and rules, then walks every way it can go and tests the rules at every step. It finds out whether a dead character speaks again, whether a player can get stuck, and which scenes nobody ever reaches.
Why here: The check itself: your AI walks every path through the model and names the one where a dead character speaks. Prose cannot do this.
4
Wiki entry
Find scenes from which the story can never reach an ending
Every scene has a way forward, yet the player can still wander for ever without finishing the game. Here is the reverse way of looking at the map that exposes these traps, and why checking each scene's exits one by one misses them.
Why here: The most common hole is not a contradiction but a dead end. Find scenes from which no ending is reachable before you write more of them.
5
Story help
How to Keep Your Game Characters Consistent
Put each character's fixed facts in a model and have a checker walk every path. It shows the exact scenes where someone acts against their sheet.
Why here: With the plot sound, characters: the rules a character never breaks belong in the model too, as facts the AI must respect.
6
Story help
How to Make Player Choices That Really Matter
A choice matters when the game remembers it and shows the result later. Model every choice and have a checker find the paths where nothing changes.
Why here: Choices only matter if they change facts. Now that facts exist, decide which choices move them, and which are only flavour.
7
Wiki entry
Find the choices after which an ending is lost for good
Some choices close doors that cannot be reopened, and a player who loves a particular ending deserves a warning before the choice, not after. Here is how to list every choice that cuts off endings, and which endings it cuts off.
Why here: Players forgive a lost ending if they were warned. Finding the point of no return is a search over the model you already have.
8
Story help
How to Build Quests That Do Not Get Stuck
A quest gets stuck when a step needs something that is gone. Model who holds what, and a checker shows the exact path to each stuck quest.
Why here: Last the quests, because they sit on top of everything: a quest that waits for a flag no path sets is the story's dead end in disguise.

At the end

Your AI holds a model of your story and shows you the exact path that breaks a rule, before a player finds it.

What this rests on

Talks, articles and research from outside this wiki, so you are not taking our word for it.

Beyond Branching: Quality-Based, Salience-Based, and Waypoint Narrative Structures (Emily Short, Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling (blog), 2016)
Explains why a plain tree of branches gets unmanageable and shows other ways to organise story content so it still fits together as the player's choices pile up.
Ink: The Narrative Scripting Language Behind '80 Days' and 'Sorcery!' (Joseph Humfrey (inkle), GDC 2016, 2016)
Shows how a studio that ships heavily branching stories keeps them writable and manageable by describing the branches in a simple, writer-friendly text format.
10 Key Quest Design Lessons from 'The Witcher 3' and 'Cyberpunk 2077' (Paweł Sasko (CD Projekt RED), GDC 2023, 2023)
A veteran quest designer's lessons on structuring plots, choices and consequences, and common pitfalls in big story-driven quests.
Telling non-linear stories with interval temporal logic (Matt Thompson, Steve Battle, Julian Padget, ICIDS 2015 (Springer LNCS 9445), 2015)
Describes a way to write a story as a precise map of states so a computer can automatically check that every possible telling stays consistent.
Modeling and formal verification of gaming storylines (Lane Thomas Holloway, PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2016)
Shows why complex branching plots end up inconsistent or unplayable and presents a writer-friendly description language plus a checking tool that finds such errors automatically.

Say this to your AI

Follow the Spielerando learning path "A story that holds together" (get_path story-that-holds-together) for my game, step by step, and tell me at each step why it comes now.

Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP