2026-06-28 To Type a Tale devlog

The most important progress this week was the creation of most of the marketing material for my store pages, but there were also several tweaks to the game based on player feedback. We'll start, as usual, with the user-facing changes, including better music, a reworded options page, and a new typing overlay.

The music improvements (inspired by Squish's feedback) include the processing of all collected letters, regardless of source; so typing, clicking, and pre-collecting all trigger music now. Additionally, the music manager uses two methods to reduce the amount of silence you experience: letters are processed at a non-constant, non-immediate rate (roughly based on your typing speed) and if the queue gets too small, it can inject more letters automatically. Currently, only the main story injects these anti-silence letters, and only punctuation letters, but it helps to prevent the deafening silence. To counter this constant music, tracks can also randomly choose to play silence instead of their music file, which adds some variety.

The options page, inspired by Wlonkest in Wede's feedback, has been retooled slightly to have better grammar. The "is currently" declarations now have a colon after "currently" and a period at the end, so they read like full sentences (still wonky, but slightly better). Multi-options with no selected settings will now display "is currently: none." Options subpages also now start with a title so you're never confused about which page you're on. And, possibly the most pedantic change, "PRE COLLECT" is now "PRECOLLECT," because those all-caps words are variables in my code and I can't include hyphens in variable names. To satisfy WiW's desire to type complete pages, I also added an execution mode that automatically moves to the next page once all on-screen main text is typed.

Another change inspired by multiple players commenting on it is the addition of a description of the framing narrative. I still don't think it's that important to the enjoyment of the game, so I stuck it in as a hidden treat at the end of the tutorial, but it's there now, so you can't complain anymore.

The biggest change you'll notice, however, is the typing overlay. As you type, the letters you have typed will appear near the bottom of the scroll, allowing you to see exactly what you have typed. If you don't want to see this, it can be turned off in the options.

The only major backend change this week was moving the volume/graphics options to a separate file, to enable cross-platform cloud-syncing on Steam.

On the story side, I started working on chapter 2 again. This week was focused on reworking the first hub to better match my new ideas for this chapter (in particular, not allowing you to proceed to the second hub until the first hub is complete). I also started work on the doctor visit and the first real consequence of publicly exposing your status as an HIA agent.

As mentioned at the start, the big work this week was the creation of most of the marketing material for the Steam store page. I filled in all their onboarding info (e.g. system requirements, what features the game has, etc.), created the various images that will be displayed in the store and library (ones you never really think about until you make a game), and put my editing skills to the test in creating a trailer. The store page is not live yet (though I did update the in-game links to point to it), but you can view the trailer here.

Next week is going to be even more work on finishing the Steam/itch.io store pages. I'll likely also spend some time writing more chapter 2 material, and might even start futzing about with my ideas for the next game.