FOR RELEASE ON 7 OCTOBER 2026

PANELWAVE PLAYER PUBLISHED AS OPEN SOURCE ON NPM

MIT-licensed Angular library renders interactive graphic novels with branching navigation, three view modes, video panels and WCAG-oriented accessibility; available as @panelwave/player.

Munich, 7 October 2026. PanelWave today published the PanelWave Player on the
public npm registry as @panelwave/player
(https://www.npmjs.com/package/@panelwave/player). The player is an MIT-
licensed Angular library (Angular 20 to 22) that renders interactive graphic
novels from a PanelWave manifest, the open JSON format the company published
yesterday. Any website can embed it, and any work authored in the PanelWave
format plays in it without a PanelWave account.

The release marks the completion of the player's core feature phases. The
library's unit suite and an end-to-end suite with automated accessibility
checks run across desktop and mobile browsers, and the player documentation
(https://docs.panelwave.org/player/overview) describes the library as it
behaves, including a published list of known limitations.

WHAT THE PLAYER RENDERS

  - Graph-based navigation. Chapters are graphs of panels; edges carry
    conditions evaluated against typed story variables, so branching
    narratives, detours and loops are ordinary graph shapes and back-
    navigation works throughout.

  - Three view modes. Panel view for one panel at a time, page view for
    composed comic pages, and canvas view, in which a chapter's panels sit on
    one continuous plane and a camera glides between them along the story.

  - Video panels and a four-bus audio engine. Video layers with loop and ping-
    pong modes and poster frames; ambient, music, voiceover and sound-effect
    buses with independent volume.

  - A comic balloon engine. Ten balloon types drawn as SVG, with a styling
    cascade shared with the PanelWave CMS so authored lettering renders
    identically for readers.

  - Interactive hotspots and panel variants. Clickable regions that navigate,
    set variables or open bonus content, and alternative panel content
    selected by reader state.

  - Localization without a reload. Per-locale text and asset variants with
    fallback chains and instant language switching.

  - Accessibility. Keyboard traversal of the whole story including hotspots,
    labelled controls, reduced-motion support that also degrades video
    autostart and camera movement, and reader settings for manga mode and high
    contrast.

  - Paywalls without payment processing. An entitlement adapter interface
    delegates access decisions to the host's own backend; the player never
    handles payments itself.

  - Consent-aware analytics and a plugin sandbox. Nothing is recorded without
    consent where the work requires it; third-party plugins run in sandboxed
    iframes under a capability model.

OPEN SOURCE BY DESIGN

The player is the second open layer of the PanelWave ecosystem, alongside the
format itself. It deliberately contains all rendering logic: the commercial
PanelWave CMS embeds the same library for its preview rather than
reimplementing rendering, which guarantees that a creator's preview matches
what readers see and keeps a single rendering codebase in the open.

"A format is only open if there is an open way to read it," said Jens Hoppe,
founder of PanelWave. "Publishing the player under MIT means a creator can
leave our tools at any time, host their work themselves, and it still plays.
That is the promise the whole ecosystem rests on."

AVAILABILITY

The PanelWave Player is available now from npm for Angular 20, 21 and 22
applications. Installation, a five-minute embed, the complete input and output
reference and contributor documentation are at docs.panelwave.org/player
(https://docs.panelwave.org/player/overview). The source repository, issue
tracker and demo application are linked from panelwave.org/player
(https://panelwave.org/player).

ABOUT PANELWAVE

PanelWave is an open ecosystem for creating, distributing and experiencing
interactive graphic novels. It consists of three layers: an open JSON format
specification published under CC BY 4.0, an open-source web player under the
MIT licence, and a commercial no-code CMS for professional authoring,
localization, publishing and monetization. Stories are modelled as a graph of
panels with layered artwork, speech balloons, hotspots, audio and video,
branching narratives and multilingual content, and readers keep control of
pace, path, language and accessibility settings. Creators keep 100% of their
content revenue, and the open format ensures there is no vendor lock-in.
PanelWave is developed in Munich, Germany. More at panelwave.org
(https://panelwave.org).

MEDIA CONTACT

Jens Hoppe, Founder - press@panelwave.org - https://panelwave.org/press
