2026-06-21 To Type a Tale devlog

And so begins the final pass. There were so many small changes this week and most aren't worth mentioning. The big ones were minor improvements to FuzzySearch, new music and sound effects, and some QA helpers.

The main reason I have so little to report this week is that I spent so long trying to get a better FuzzySearch implementation. You can read about it in my dev rant from a few days ago. Unfortunately, I never got a better algorithm working well enough to replace the old one. So I made some minor improvements (dynamic error tolerance, better code organization) and moved on after the 3 days of beating my head against the wall.

If you've messed with the options before, you probably noticed the "difficulty" option and its opaque usage. This was used by FuzzySearch to determine when to consider the search "failed" and then, once all searches in each section had failed, they reset. It didn't really have anything to do with difficulty and the "errors" it mentions were not tracked anywhere permanent. So I removed it and just set a static error allowance of 5 (which now increases by 1 for every 10 typed letters).

The more important user-facing changes this week were the addition of sound effects (thank you to Matthew for the suggestion) and a new set of music tracks for chapter 1. Take a listen and let me know what you think.

Smaller changes include some dynamic resizing/scaling of the graphics (so the rolled-up scrolls are wider on larger screens), animation for defusing words, and a bunch of touch-ups in preparation for release. Namely, I changed the story title to match the marketing (The Lone Crin Tale -> A Crin in Shadow), added links to full licenses from the license pages, and removed the copy of Macbeth (I might add that back in for the full release).

On the QA side of things, I put together two helper tools for speeding up my testing process: DebugState and DebugPath. DebugState allows me to quickly revert to a certain game-state so I can start the scenario fresh. DebugPath allows me to automate typing all the text in a full or partial run. It's not foolproof and will likely never be publicly available, but it helps me run my QA tests reliably without wearing out my keyboard.

All that remains before the public demo is ready is gathering screenshots/gameplay videos, minor touch-ups to the scroll image, and finalizing the Steam/Itch store pages. Steam has a waiting period after uploading the binary, so the game won't go live for a while, and I want to avoid Next Fest anyways. So expect the public demo to go live in early- to mid-July.

Once the demo is live, I'll be taking a short break, addressing public feedback, and then I'll be starting in on the code for my next game (while continuing to work on the story for TTaT).