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Stalker PDA — documentation for story writers

Stalker PDA is an Android game set in the Stalker universe: the app turns your phone into something like a stalker's PDA. The player explores locations in the Zone, completes quests, trades, talks with factions, and reads in-game news. You can download the game on Google Play.

This documentation is written for non-programmers. It's not about Kotlin, Spring Boot, or libGDX — it's about how the game works as a world and a system of rules: what a story is made of, how the map works, what factions and their relations are, and how to put it all together in the web editor without writing a single line of code.

Who this is for​

  • Story writers who come up with and assemble quests and stories in the Story Editor.
  • Game designers who balance rewards, faction relations, and new locations.
  • New developers who need to quickly understand the game's concepts before diving into the source code.

Where to start​

  1. Read “Project Ecosystem” — what parts make up Stalker PDA and how they connect.
  2. Study the “Writing Stories” section — the core of this documentation: the story model, conditions, actions, and dialogues.
  3. Read about the map and world and factions and relations — the context your story lives in.
  4. Open the Story Editor and follow the “Story Editor” section to put a story together in practice.
If you've already written stories before

Feel free to jump straight to the action reference and the point type reference — everything is laid out there as tables.

The setting in one paragraph​

The Zone is a post-apocalyptic territory inhabited by mutants, anomalies, and people split into factions: Loners, Bandits, Military, Freedom, Duty, Monolith, Mercenaries, Scientists, and Clear Sky. The player is a stalker just like everyone else: they have money, experience, an inventory, a reputation with each faction, and a PDA that delivers quests, news, and messages. Every story you write adds new dialogue, map points, items, and plot twists to this world.

About open questions

Some mechanics (such as the Lua script syntax or transitions between maps) aren't fully documented in the source code. Such spots are honestly flagged as “check with the developers” — see “Open Questions”.