If anyone is coming to this topic looking for instructions or what-have-you, I'll just add my two cents' worth of tips/caveats about some of the more crazy-making bugs, er, "features" of the Foundry UI:
- If playtesting starts acting flaky (your toon/ship won't move, your starship starts "falling" in zero gravity, interact dialogs taking way too long etc,), SAVE, then go to the FILE menu and CLOSE PROJECT, then EXIT THE FOUNDRY. You will dump back out to your test toon screen, and he/she will probably load for a few extra seconds. Go back in and it should behave normally. This usually starts happening when you've either made a major edit, or a bunch of minor ones. This is probably caused by a memory leak somewhere in the programming.
- If it locks up or crashes on you, don't panic. The Foundry autosaves your progress pretty regularly, and gives you the option to recover once you restart the program.
- The "Hidden" and "Visible" fields under the "State" tab WILL MAKE YOU NUTS. From what I can tell, their labels are completely reversed (but not always!). If making an item/NPC appear or disappear isn't behaving the way it should, try using Hide when you think you should use Show and vice versa.
- You can only use an item/NPC/Reach Marker/etc as an object in a Story Library interaction ONCE. If you need the thing more than once, then make more than one of them and give them unique names.
- Do your map-building first. Build the set, put in your actors and make sure they're performing the way they're supposed to, and ONLY THEN should you worry about writing their dialogue. Just stick some placeholder text in the message boxes. I use LOLspeak for this purpose, personally. :P
There's more, but those are the ones that will piss you off and make you tear your hair out the most. And again I cannot stress this enough: when in doubt, SAVE, CLOSE, EXIT AND RETRY! Rebooting the software fixes a lot of stupidity.