2026-04-27 Type It All devlog

The second full week of nose-to-the-grindstone work has a lot of progress to report! The biggest thing playtesters will notice is that I actually have a story to play through now. However, there are a number of other large improvements, both user-facing and backend.

The story is tentatively titled The Lone Crin Tale, but will probably be renamed soon. It follows a dragon-like protagonist surviving an attack by mysterious assailants and trying to both figure out who they are and somehow prevent their continued assault. A lot of the CYOA features are implemented (e.g. choosing actions at pivotal moments, gaining inventory, branching narratives), but a lot is also still missing.

The other major user-facing changes this week involve saving/loading progress and a "story selection" main page on launch. Progress in each story is stored and loaded automatically in the user data folder (search for "Type It All" and then delete "progress.save" to reset progress). Eventually, there will be an in-game option to reset progress on a per-story basis. This is important as the CYOA features that cause story branches have now been implemented, with a hidden inventory tracking things like wounded body parts, gifts from friendly characters, and other valuable (and less valuable) items/trackers.

On a technical note, the CYOA commands added this week are addinventory, removeinventory, ifreplace (conditionally replaces text in the paragraph based on inventory values), and nextis (indicates which paragraph is next, rather than just index+1).

Some minor user-facing changes include a fix for letter-highlighting occasionally glitching out, unpredictable behavior when typing text that includes multiple blue commands, and "orphan" punctuation that is not adjacent to a word (e.g. emdashes with spaces on either side).

The backend changes, while not immediately visible, will help with better organization and improve my development speed. The .tiat files I had been using to store the typeable text have been changed to .tiac "Chapters", which are then grouped into .tias "Stories", which are in turn managed by StoryManager. This allows me to separate the concerns of typing text from determining what text to display next and when. The .tias files also contain metadata on both the Story and the Chapters to hopefully prevent version incompatibilities. They also include currency renames (e.g. "typed words" -> "narrative gold"), though those haven't been fully implemented yet.

Next week will be primarily focused on finishing up both the text and the CYOA functionality for chapter 1 of the crin tale, as well as adding a much-needed options menu. If I have spare time after that, I will also research and compose the musical score for the first chapter. With those taken care of, I can put together the Steam/Itch pages and publish a demo. I won't be taking that public until I have feedback from friends first.