Short answer: The gear in Forge's top bar opens the settings dialog, and everything in it affects only you as the author - never your readers. It covers your interface preferences (tooltips, delete confirmations, strip layout, which view Forge opens on, a layout reset) and your personal playback experience while editing. Settings that readers actually experience - save behavior, skip policy, reader defaults, your game's look - live on the project's Settings page outside Forge.
The rule: author-only
Nothing in this dialog touches your published or shared game. It's your workspace, so tune it freely - readers will never notice.
General
Your interface preferences:
- Hide tooltips if you know your way around and want less chrome.
- Confirm before deleting events (on by default) - governs the Delete action on the timeline. Deleting a whole scene or episode always asks, whatever this is set to.
- Full-width strips to run the scene strips across the whole window instead of under the stage.
- Open on the view I left (off by default) - Forge normally opens on the Stage. Turn this on and it reopens wherever you were last: Story Map, Script, Split, Theme or Menu. A link that names a view still wins.
- Reset my layout - puts panel sizes, the timeline height, strip zoom, sprite shelves and Story Map cameras back to their defaults when you have dragged something somewhere useless. It asks first, then reloads Forge. Your settings and your writing are untouched.
Playback
Your own in-editor playback experience on the Stage: audio volumes, text-reveal sounds, text size, skip behavior, auto-advance, voice playback, captions, and reduce motion. These are the same kinds of knobs a reader can set for themselves in the player, but yours are kept completely separate - they shape only your editing sessions on this device, never a reader's defaults. Every row works the same way as on the General tab: a switch for on/off settings, a row of choices for the rest. Dialogue blips on means each speaker's text-reveal sound plays as their line appears; off means no blip sound.
What's not here
- Reader-facing settings - save behavior, skip policy, reader playback defaults, and your game's presentation - live on the project's Settings page, outside Forge.
- Defaults for new sprites (entrance animation, idle motion) live in the Sprites dock: open the cog in its toolbar.
- Payment-gate testing - practice purchases and clearing your test buys happen on the project's Monetization page and the Stage itself, not in this dialog. See the payment events article below.