2026-09-20 To Type a Tale devlog

These past two weeks were about finalizing the text and music. Chapter 4 was written and all the music was created. Other tweaks were added based on some feedback and testing.

Both versions of chapter 4 are now written. Both are relatively short compared to the previous chapters, and neither involve any choices, just consequences for previous choices. Having finished all the text, I've also decided on a canon ending (intergalactic zoo), but I still need to figure out the canon choices which led to that. If the game becomes popular enough to justify further work on it, the first addition I'll be making is a free audiobook version of the canon path/ending.

The music for all chapters is now complete. It still doesn't sound very good, but I'm labeling it "good enough for now." To avoid driving away potential customers, I've decreased the default music volume to 50% and added a quick-option to the start of the tutorial to turn it down further. I also did a rework of some of the tracks for the tutorial, chapter 1, and chapter 2 to reduce particularly-loud tracks (e.g. snare). I also decided to slow down all the tracks to 90bpm to better fit the feel of the story.

Based on some short feedback from the one YouTuber who's already looked at my game, I tweaked the tutorial some more: I moved the quick-options to an earlier paragraph, added another early paragraph emphasizing reading before typing, and removed the ability to skip the tutorial. That last one is kind of a rage-removal, as I'm sick of seeing people skip the tutorial and then be confused about how to play. That's why the tutorial is there! This game is weird!

Another minor tweak was rearranging the menu again. I moved the options link to the top, return/resume to the bottom, and several low-traffic menus into a separate "extras" menu. I also added links to Discord and the store pages, so you don't have to replay the tutorial to access them.

The main time-sink this week was the editing passes for all chapters. Due to the sheer combinatorial complexity, I wasn't able to fully review all inter-paragraph continuity, but I did tackle all possible intra-paragraph issues (e.g. typos, ifreplace logic errors). In case you're curious (and to put it in perspective), I calculated that the second half of chapter 3 (the interrogation portion) has ~500 potential starting states which can affect the displayed text throughout.

Speaking of chapter 3, I decided to invisibly split it into two parts: the capturing portion and the interrogation portion. There is no "Chapter 3: ..." title at the beginning of the second half, so you likely won't even notice the split unless you're paying close attention, but it made the editing passes much smoother for me.

The major all-chapters editing change I made was to decapitalize "Kuna" and "Ulros" throughout, except when mentioning Tola's department explicitly AS a department. "Ulros" was originally meant as a proper noun and to be used exclusively as a department name, but it morphed into a kind of profession, alongside "Kuna."

Finally, a strange technical issue was causing major slowdown when accessing the options menu. This was due to how the chapter progress files, when loaded, would also generate a bunch of Nodes representing the already-generated paragraphs of the chapter. To avoid this causing the slowdown, I added a flag to allow partial loading of chapter progress files which is only used when accessing the options menu.

Outside of To Type a Tale, I've been experimenting with a few features which might find their way into the next game: procedural animation, more advanced shaders, and debug utility features. These are all still in the discovery phase, but I'll post about them separately (in the blog and Discord) once I have something visual to show off.

Next week will begin the big marketing push. I likely won't be posting many (if any) more TTaT devlogs, but I will start documenting my experiments and next games. (If you're reading this on Steam/itch.io, join the Discord!)

Raw Git Log

• tweaked tutorial based on YouTuber feedback
  • added section to beginning of tutorial with options to increase font size and reduce music volume
  • rewrote first real paragraph to start with a "Read the text!" sentence at the start (seriously? who starts typing before they've read the text they're typing?)
  • removed blue-word options for skipping the tutorial and going straight to the story; this game is unlike any other I've seen and I'm sick of people skipping the tutorial and then being confused about how to play
• music adjustments
  • added a Bitcrush effect on a few instruments, slowed all the tracks down to 90 BPM, and tweaked some notes
  • added tracks for ch03_forest, ch03_city, ch04a, and ch04b (ch04b is currently just a copy of ch04a, but I may change that later)
  • changed default music volume to "medium" (70%)
  • fixed some text-command and editing errors in ch3 and ch4a
  • reworked tutorial to remove a bunch of unnecessary text
• added "highlight" text command
  • added a "highlight" text command which puts a spinning circle around specified words and links them with an animated rainbow line; this is primarily used in the tutorial to emphasize the blue-word progression mechanic
  • also reworked how chapter progress is checked when going to the options menu (which is done to see which chapters are available for restarting); the new version only partially loads the chapter progress, to avoid instantiating a bunch of GeneratedParagraphs
  • also added Backspace as a valid key for resetting typing
• writing: finished ch04b
  • also renamed chapter 2 to "A City Unaware"
• improved chapter 4b and general cleanup
  • added additional text to 4b to reference choices which affect the ending counter; 4a already has these as a "slideshow", but 4b needed a different approach, so most of it is in the pre-flight "speech"
  • unified the presentation of endings in 4a and 4b: anytime Tola dies, it does a pagebreak and then "Tola's report ends here abruptly" followed by a note on how the report was recovered; all endings now also have either that or Tola's sign-off before the Ulros department addendum and senate ruling, for consistency
  • fixed an issue with the word highlighter that was causing issues when highlighting things outside main-text
  • changed tutorial music to use antisilence methods so new players can hear how loud it is on the tutorial screen which lets you change that
  • decreased default music volume again to "low" (50%); I really don't want to drive away new players with the crappy music, but I'm also too proud of how I got it working
  • added a "mute music" quick-option to tutorial
• editing fixes for ch1 and ch2
  • this is the big editing pass to find any mistakes I missed when writing; there may still be some inter-paragraph continuity issues, but I should be able to deal with any intra-paragraph editing issues
  • ch1: removed some redundant ifreplaces; if you don't visit Nockck, you're guaranteed to spot the pursuers, so changing the verbiage based on that is pointless
  • ch2: similarly, if you need both the doctor and a coat, then you didn't visit Nockck, which means you've self-identified as HIA, so the "return" trip to the artisans quarter is guaranteed to involve spooky
  • ch2: fixed an issue where tailor_hia was removed before it was used
  • ch2: changed some verbiage that was treating Kuna like ninja, rather than the berserkers they are
• split ch3 into two parts
  • the "capture" and "interrogation" parts of chapter 3 are entirely separate, so there's no reason not to have them as separate chapters; to prevent some other issues, I've labeled them ch03_1 and ch03_2 internally
  • there is no "Chapter ..." paragraph in ch03_2 because it's technically still supposed to be part of chapter 3 (thematically)
• editing pass on ch03_1
  • performed the editing pass on ch3, part 1
  • main issue discovered was the logic error(s) in calculating how many prisoners you can carry back; it should all be ironed out now, but I had to add an additional tracker item and tweak a bunch of ifreplaces
  • changed all of the restart commands in ch03_1 to restart at the beginning of ch02 instead, as there is only one obscure way to die in ch3 that was not a result of who you recruited in ch2
  • also decapitalized Kuna and Ulros in all the chapters (except where it is explicitly used as a department name); if it's not a proper noun, it's not capitalized
  • fixed some leftover bugs from the ch03->ch03_1 rename
• editing pass on ch03_2
  • much fewer issues in the interrogation portion of ch3
  • I continue to fail to put all the necessary parameters in the ifreplace and ifreplacelist commands; if I do any more work on this game after release, I need to find a way to actually check for proper parameters
• editing pass for ch04a and ch04b
  • no major issues
• minor tweaks
  • removed the "highlight" commands in the tutorial; it just doesn't work consistently enough to be worthwhile
  • reduced the volume of the tutorial music tracks to match those of the main chapters
  • added "return" commands to a few menus which were missing it
  • rearranged the main menu to emphasize the options link
  • moved several low-traffic menus (credits, licenses) to an "extras" menu and added Discord and store links to that new menu