2026-07-05 To Type a Tale devlog

To Type a Tale is in-review by Steam! If all goes well, the public demo (as well as the store page) will go live on July 9th, right after the Steam Summer Sale ends. Once the Steam store page goes live, I'll also publish the itch.io page with its demo. If you haven't seen it yet, the trailer is here. I'll also be uploading it to the company's YouTube channel prior to go-live.

The other big update this week is that I added in-game achievements. These will eventually also proc Steam achievements for the Steam version, but the in-game achievements will work for all versions. I currently have 7 achievements, and they can be viewed from the main menu. Once you unlock an achievement, it will display the unlock date. Notice something odd about it?

The backend had some work to clean up my custom file formats. The various JSON files (story metadata, music groups, and achievements) now just use the .json extension, instead of .tias, .tiam, etc., but use a custom loader to build the appropriate objects. This will make modding slightly more user-friendly.

Another important backend feature that you won't notice at all is pack loading: I can now package file updates and platform-specific code in separate files, allowing me to exclude the Steamworks libraries from non-Steam releases.

On the writing side, I've finished the first half of chapter 2, so work can begin on the second half. Chapter 2 is split into two hubs, with the first half being recovery/relaxation, and the second half being recruiting. Chapter 2 (the first half) currently weighs in at 2540 words, compared to chapter 1's 3213. I was clearly overly optimistic that I could get this done in 10,000 words, let alone the original goal of 8,000.

I still have a lot of writing to do, as well as the code to support it, but I have plans for both and I'm making progress! Once the demo goes live, I'm also going to start cross-posting these devlogs to Steam, and will likely start emphasizing the story progress, rather than just code.