Atelier Studio Download

Everything your novel needs to remember.

A native macOS writing studio with a full story bible, relationship mapping, POV tracking and your choice of AI — all stored locally on your Mac.

Your manuscript is a file on your Mac. No account required, no subscription, works offline.

The main editor: a dark sidebar of manuscript sections, a chapter list with
               per-chapter word counts, and a scene of formatted prose with its point-of-view
               character, word count, formatting toolbar and daily goal above it.
Chapters and scenes to one side, prose down the middle, and every other tool one click away in the sidebar.

Where the writing happens

A writing app first.

Chapters and scenes down one side, prose down the middle, and everything else out of the way. Scenes are the unit you edit; the chapter is just the container. Set the point-of-view character from the scene header, watch a daily word goal fill, and run a timer if that's how you work.

  • Typographic control over line height, first-line indent, paragraph spacing and measure — a view preference, never baked into your file
  • Smart quotes and em-dashes on by default; autocorrect off, because fiction needs the first and not the second
  • Focus mode ⌥⌘F takes over the whole window
  • Continuous read ⌥⌘R stitches a chapter — or the whole book — into one uninterrupted read
Focus mode: the interface stripped back to a single column of prose, with only
                 a scene name, word count, daily goal and a writing timer at the edges.
Focus mode ⌥⌘F — everything but the prose gets out of the way, with the goal and timer kept to the margins.

The real failure mode

The things that kill a draft aren't typos.

They're tracking problems, and they get worse the more ambitious the book is. Each one below has a tool pointed straight at it.

A viewpoint character disappears for nine chapters and nobody notices until the beta reader does.

Screen Time — words and scenes per POV, with a balance score that flags any viewpoint that's been away too long.

A secret is revealed in chapter four and referenced as unknown in chapter eleven.

Knowledge Map — records who knows each fact, who explicitly doesn't, and the scene where it broke.

A planted clue never pays off.

Foreshadowing — link a setup to its payoff and see at a glance what's still unresolved.

Two factions' timelines silently contradict each other.

Timeline — scenes ordered by in-story chronology instead of chapter order, so overlaps surface.

Chapter two is wrong, and rewriting it means losing the version that had the good paragraph.

Version history ⌥⌘H — every scene snapshot kept, with a side-by-side diff and one-click restore.

Three apps: a word processor, a wiki, and a spreadsheet. None of them talk to each other.

One library — prose, story bible and continuity in a single local file.

The part no other writing tool does

Point of view as a knowledge state, not a label.

Every other app treats POV as a tag on a scene. Dramatic irony, suspense, and the "why didn't these two just talk to each other" plot hole are all functions of who knows what, and when. In a single-POV novel you hold that in your head. In an ensemble epic, you can't.

Four tools on one screen

  • Screen Time — words and scenes per POV character, with a balance score.
  • Knowledge Map — tag a fact as a secret, revelation, clue, backstory, prophecy or misdirection, then record exactly who knows it.
  • Scene Order — detects consecutive same-POV runs and flags where interleaving would build tension.
  • Timeline Sync — finds scenes happening simultaneously across different viewpoints.
The POV Manager's Screen Time tab: totals for scenes, words, POV characters
                 and unassigned scenes, a per-character share bar, and a Needs Attention panel
                 warning that a viewpoint character has not appeared for eight scenes.
Screen Time, flagging a viewpoint that has been off the page too long — the failure that usually reaches a beta reader first.

Chronology, separately from chapter order

The timeline arranges scenes the way the story happens rather than the way it's told, so contradictions between two threads surface instead of hiding.

The timeline view showing chapters as cards in narrative order, each listing
                 its scenes, point-of-view character and word count.
Narrative order shown here — switch to Story Time to sort by in-world chronology instead.

Story bible

Structured records, not a pile of wiki pages.

Relationships

Your whole cast, as a map

An interactive graph of everyone in the book, with their portraits on the nodes. Lay it out in concentric rings by narrative role, or cluster it by faction with the groups drawn in behind. Filter to conflicts only, or to the characters nobody is connected to yet — usually the ones you've forgotten about.

The relationship graph: character portraits arranged in concentric rings by
                 narrative role, connected by coloured lines showing family, rivalry, romantic
                 and professional ties.
Roles in rings, relationships typed and coloured. Drag a node and the position is remembered per manuscript and per layout.

Characters

Dossiers deep enough to write from

Portraits, traits, goals, fears, secrets, speech patterns, personality profiles, character arcs, questionnaires and casting notes — grouped by narrative role so the cast reads as a structure rather than a list.

  • A world codex for everything else
  • Typed relationships between characters
The character grid, showing illustrated portrait cards grouped under
                 Protagonist, Antagonist and Main Character headings, each card tagged with
                 the character's role and traits.

Locations

Every place, with a picture and a pin

Location dossiers carry their own images, notes and map coordinates, and each one is typed — city, town, building, wilderness, landmark — so a sprawling world stays navigable. Anything you've placed shows an on map badge and appears on the world map alongside the rest.

The locations grid: illustrated location cards for towns, cities,
                 wilderness and landmarks, each tagged with its type and an on-map badge.
Every place typed, illustrated, and pinned to the world map.

Planning

A visual outline that knows about scenes

Blueprint is a beat board with nested items, POV assignment and drag-to-reorder. Scenes attach to beats, so the plan and the prose stay the same object.

  • Subplots tracked across the whole manuscript
  • Foreshadowing setups linked to their payoffs
  • The full ten-step Snowflake Method, guided
The Blueprint outline board, showing a fifteen-beat story structure from
                 Opening Image through Finale, each beat a row that scenes can be added to.

Genre plugins

Only the sections your book needs

Write fantasy and you get magic systems, a pantheon, factions and a bestiary. Write science fiction and you get a technology registry, starships, and planets. Write general fiction and none of it clutters the sidebar.

The sidebar's Fantasy section, listing Magic Systems, Pantheon, Factions and
                 Bestiary, with Bestiary selected.

Revision

Nothing you write is ever really gone.

Every scene keeps its own history automatically, and you can name a snapshot when a draft is worth marking. Compare any version against what's on the page now, and restore it if the earlier one was right.

More ways back than forward

  • Version history ⌥⌘H — automatic snapshots plus named ones, compared side by side
  • Scene comments ⌥⌘C — anchored to a quoted excerpt, so they survive reformatting and re-find themselves after edits
  • Scene inspector ⌥⌘0 — summary, purpose, conflict, notes, tags and story date, feeding the timeline and POV tools
  • Search and replace ⇧⌘F — across the whole manuscript, not one scene at a time
The Version History panel: a list of automatic and named snapshots with
                 timestamps and word counts on the left, and the selected version shown
                 side by side against the current one on the right.
A named draft compared against the current text, with restore one click away.

Artificial intelligence, on your terms

Bring your own key.

Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI or DeepSeek. Keys are stored in the macOS Keychain — never in a config file, never on our servers, because there are no servers. You pay your provider directly, at cost, with no subscription in between.

  • Gemini
  • Claude
  • OpenAI
  • DeepSeek

Every AI feature lives in one docked panel, so there's exactly one place to look. Writing, chapters, characters, the relationship graph and export all work without a key at all.

The docked AI panel with six mode tabs — Chat, Rewrite, Analysis, Dialogue,
                 Draft and Feedback — showing analysis options including Polish Prose, Plot
                 Development, Character Analysis and Consistency Check.

Chat

A conversation with your manuscript as context.

Rewrite

Refine or expand a passage you've selected.

Analysis

Continuity checks, chapter critique, pacing.

Dialogue

Lines in your characters' established voices.

Draft

A chapter drafted from your outline and prior context.

Feedback

Two drafts compared — what improved, and what was lost.


How it compares

Native, offline, and yours.

Feature comparison against tools novelists commonly run alongside each other.
Capability Scrivener Campfire World Anvil Novelcrafter Atelier Studio
PlatformMac / WinWebWebWebmacOS native
PricingOne-timeSubscriptionSubscriptionSubscription + APIOne-time
Works offlineYesNoNoNoYes
Account requiredNoYesYesYesNo
AINoneLimitedLimitedBring your own keyBring your own key, 4 providers
POV knowledge trackingNoNoNoNoYes

Your data

A file on your Mac, readable without us.

Your library is a SQLite database in your own user folder. If this app vanished tomorrow, your work is still readable with free tools.

Export anywhere

Word .docx in standard manuscript format for agents and editors, plus PDF, Markdown and plain text.

Take the whole library

One command writes everything to a plain folder — Markdown for humans, your images, and the raw database for re-import. Read-only; it never touches your work.

Backups that keep themselves

Automatic timestamped snapshots with configurable retention, and a merge importer ⇧⌘I that dedupes by name instead of duplicating.

Start with a blank page.

Requires macOS 13.5 or later. Runs on Apple silicon and Intel.

This beta isn't notarised by Apple yet, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open. It ships with no API key and asks for no account.