To Type a Tale

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• Patch Notes·20 Sept 2026Official

  Weekly Devlog 2026-09-20

  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 t...
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• Patch Notes·6 Sept 2026Official

  Weekly Devlog 2026-09-06

  No code changes this week, just more story! Specifically, chapter 4a (ground assault) has been written. I also put together the music for chapter 2 and decided on the music themes for chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 4 does not involve any choices, just reading and typing. It does introduce a new challenge word (explosive), but the main focus is on showing the consequences of your previous choices. There are two chapter 4's, which one you get depending on your choice at the end of chapter 3 (ground assault or aerial assault). Then each of those has three endings depending on choices made in chapters 1-3. As a quick example, if Tarra did not die in chapter 3, he comes to your rescue in chapter 4. The music for chapter 2 is very bassy, with a lot of percussion and a variety of bass-tuned guitars. There are also a couple of low-frequency, 8-measure saxophone and harpsichord tracks; and a mid-frequency 4-measure "synth chorus" track to simulate the street chatter. I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out, but a lifetime of avoiding learning about music will do that. At least I seem to be getting better? Next week will hopefully see the completion of chapter 4b and the music for chapters 3 and 4. Raw Git Logmusic for ch2writing: added challenge words throughout ch3changed non-typist mode to not grey out collected wordswriting: start of chapter 4awriting: finished chapter 4a
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• Patch Notes·30 Aug 2026Official

  Weekly Devlog 2026-08-30

  This week involved finishing the story for chapter 3 and the finalizing of all achievements. As a bonus, I put together a guide for unlocking all the achievements. There are now 28 achievements: 8 achievements for activating/defusing the 4 challenge word types, 2 for the modding mini-story, 3 miscellaneous achievements, 2 for chapter 1's endings, 3 for various choices in chapter 2, 6 difficult ones for chapter 3, and 4 "hidden" achievements for chapter 4's endings. I may tweak the icons or verbiage of some of them, but they are otherwise in their final release state. The only ones not hooked up in the tiacs are chapter 4's achievements, as that hasn't been written yet. To help with unlocking all these achievements, I put together a guide in the Steam community page with hints and solutions for each achievement. It's not public yet, as no one can unlock the Steam achievements anyways, but I'll make it public (and post a similar guide to the Itch page) prior to release. Chapter 3 has been written! Specifically, all of the side-stories and main path text have been written. I still need to add a bunch of challenge words, but that shouldn't take more than a day. The real time-consuming tasks will be verifying all the path logic works as expected and... creating music. I'm probably going to hold off on both of those tasks until I have chapter 4 written, so I can do all the testing and music in one continuous week. Here's a sample from chapter 3 to whet your appetite:The southern hostile grabs their crossbow and immediately fires at Tarra, who is slightly closer due to running on all fours. He manages to dodge to the side, but the bolt still rips through his right foreclaw. Surprising even you, he then bunches up and performs a Nefarran Advance, a short-flight maneuver banned in most HIA training schools because of the high risk of permanent injury due to the wings being used both for the flight and for pushing off the ground. The maneuver is successful in the sense that h...
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• Patch Notes·23 Aug 2026Official

  Weekly Devlog 2026-08-23

  This week saw the completion of the encounter side-stories in chapter 3 and the beginning of the interrogation sequence. I also added a few debug tools to help with checking my work on the more complicated parts of the story. The final encounter side-story — waiting in the trees for the third hostile — has been completed. It has the first and probably only bad end where you don't actually die. There will be an achievement for it, as it is quite difficult to pull off. The other extreme edge-case in the encounter side-stories happens at the end, when you're prepping to return to the HIA. I won't spoil it, but it effectively requires you to make both really good choices and really bad choices at the same time. And yes, there will be an achievement for this one (I'm thinking of calling it "You looked up a guide for this, didn't you?"). The interrogation sequence is somewhat similar to chapter 2's hub-and-choice system, but with a twist: after each question, you can be interrupted by one of your teammates requesting a turn. If they're too rough, the responses you get to questions will change and you might even lose out on asking any more questions (yes, I am planning achievements for both "minimum questioning" and "maximum questioning"). Scripting has also just seen a significant improvement: I've added strict inequalities, equality, and non-equality to the conditionals! This means that "ifreplace" and such can now check greater-than without also allowing equals. That may not seem like much, but combined with the ability to use the inventory for the compare quantity, it means I can now check if one item is greater than another. This was effectively necessary to the incredibly-difficult achievement at the end of the encounters. The backend saw two minor improvements: the RESTART_CHAPTER change command now works properly with the first-restart message, and I added a debug tool to check text-generation coverage of stories. The former was previously impossible because there ...
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• Patch Notes·16 Aug 2026Official

  Weekly Devlog 2026-08-16

  This devlog series's purpose is twofold: to keep alpha/beta players up-to-date on what is happening with the game's progress, and to give fellow indie devs a peek into how I work through dev challenges. What I realized today is that I haven't detailed how I make these devlogs, which is apparently something that some other indie devs struggle with. So I'll give a quick summary in this devlog entry. First off, I use git to store all of my code, art assets, music, marketing material, and even these devlogs. If you aren't using git (or some other VCS), you need to start now. In particular, I write detailed commit messages about all of my changes (which you can see in the Raw Git Log section). Each Sunday, I pull up a list of the commits I made during the past week and paste them into a new devlog entry. I then prune any minor commits or other bits I don't feel like talking about, summarize the rest into bullet-points, and then organize those bullet-points into 4 categories: frontend, backend, scripting/modding, and writing/story. Finally, I put together an intro paragraph summarizing the largest bullet-points, translate each of the categories and their points into prose, and write a final paragraph about future plans. The final step before uploading to the 3 different fronts (personal blog, Steam, Itch) is coming up with a one-liner description of the devlog entry ("Chapter 3 progress and minor overhaul to word/letter banks" in this case). Condense and expand. This Week's Post This week was primarily focused on chapter 3, but with a few minor changes to code to make that writing easier. Chapter 3 is coming along nicely, with both the intro (and its small side-story) and the first half of the chapter (the "encounter" with the aliens) almost complete. Next week will likely see chapter 3 to about 70-90% completion. I also realized this week that I forgot to include a snippet from chapter 2. I had planned to include a passage from each finished chapter as I finished it, so ...
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