Troubleshooting

Building needs the network. Signing in needs it, Director 1 needs it, and generating assets or world data needs it. There is no offline mode and there is not going to be one — this is a design decision, not a missing feature.

If sign-in says "You’re offline", the app is telling you the truth about your machine rather than about our servers. If a turn fails with an offline error, the same applies.

What does not need the network: playing what you have already built, working in Arrange, opening the project in Godot, and running an exported build. Your game runs locally.

If Play is greyed out, its tooltip says why. "Open a project first" means no project is bound to this chat. "Another game is running" means Stage Engine is already running a game started from a different chat — stop that one first, because only one game runs at a time. "Reconnect the game folder" means the folder was moved, renamed, or is on a drive that is not attached.

If the game starts and then stops with "The game engine stopped unexpectedly", nothing you have made was lost. Try again. If your Mac also shows a crash dialog about Godot, that is the same event, not a second problem.

If it says the game cannot open yet, the project is in a state that is not runnable. The fix is to say so to Director 1 in the chat — it can read the project and repair it.

The first export to a platform downloads that platform’s export tools. If that download fails you will be told to check your internet and try again; it is the only part of exporting that needs a connection.

If a build already exists where you are saving, or a previous export left something behind, Stage Engine asks before it overwrites rather than deciding for you.

A security warning on the finished build is not a failure. Exported games are unsigned, and that is what an unsigned application looks like on both platforms.

If Director 1 reports success and the running game looks identical, the change is on disk and the running game has not reloaded it. Stop the game and start it again.

If you have had the project open in Godot at the same time, check that you saved and closed it. A save from Godot after Director 1 has edited the same file overwrites that edit.

Stage Engine prints the exact error it received rather than a friendly paraphrase of it. That is deliberate: the code identifies the failure precisely, and a rewritten version of it would not.

Quote the code when you ask for help. It is the most useful thing in the message.