Choosing your template: Chatbot, Visual Novel, Blackbox, Draft
🧩 Choosing your template: Chatbot, Visual Novel, Blackbox, Draft
Every module rests on a template. This is your very first decision: Add module asks for a name, then for a template. It "determines how information scrolls on screen", says the help text — so how your content is displayed and which blocks you will have. 🎬
🔺 This choice is final: see below.
📊 The four templates at a glance
Template | Who for | What for | What you gain |
|---|---|---|---|
Chatbot | Training courses, quizzes, assistants | Rolling out messages and inputs in a feed | The feed, the characters, the stages |
Visual Novel | Illustrated stories, narrative games | Animating a scene | The scenes, the characters and their moods |
Blackbox | Any graph that grows | Isolating a piece of logic and reusing it | One input, several outputs, callable from anywhere |
Draft | Sandbox, older projects | Laying out logic outside production | Nothing more: no characters, no rendering |
In the picker, only Chatbot (preselected) and Visual Novel are offered. The other two are obtained differently. 👇
💬 Chatbot — the discussion feed
The default template, and the most complete one. The player displays a feed that stacks events and scrolls on its own: dialogues, narrator, images, alerts, text input, number input, microphone, camera, files…
Four settings tabs are specific to it: Characters, Stages, App style, Block style.
🎭 Visual Novel — the animated scene
No scrolling feed here: a scene fills the screen, and characters appear in it, move around, mirror themselves and change mood during the dialogues. Its own settings: Characters, App style, Block style.
👉 A dedicated article already exists on the helpdesk: please refer to it.
📦 Blackbox — your reusable logic
Yes, the Blackbox really is a piece of reusable logic called from elsewhere. It is not in the picker: create it with Add graph, or by right-clicking a selection of blocks → Blackbox the selection. The blocks then move into the new graph and an Open a graph block replaces them, already rewired. ✨
It contains two special blocks: Input (only one, neither copyable nor removable) and Output (at least one). The points you add to them are the parameters and the results of your "function". The same graph can be called by several Open a graph blocks, across several modules.
🔺 Do not confuse Open a graph (calls a Blackbox and comes back) with Open module (switches to another module).
🗒️ Draft — and the "zero blocks" trap
Named Draft and described as "free-form structure", it no longer appears in the picker; you still run into it in older projects. It is excluded from compilation: never published in the application.
🔺 You sometimes read that it has "zero blocks". That is wrong. Roughly 80 blocks are common to every template: conditions, variables, lists, objects, HTTP, Baserow, Airtable, AI, audio, HTML5, JavaScript… Each template then adds its own: Chatbot +17, Visual Novel +11, Blackbox +2, Draft +0 — so still the 80 common ones. A Draft has no rendering, it is not empty.
🔒 Can you change template afterwards?
No. The name can be edited, the module can be duplicated or removed — but in its settings, the template is shown read-only. No command changes it, and duplicating keeps the original template.
🔺 So take thirty seconds before confirming: going from a Chatbot to a Visual Novel means recreating a module and redoing all of its display, since the dialogue and character blocks are not the same on either side.
→ Next step: create your first Chatbot module, then discover the graph interface. 🚀
Updated on: 21/09/2026
Thank you!