2026-07-26 To Type a Tale devlog

Lots of non-game-related obligations have been popping up, which have prevented me from making much progress, which is why I skipped last week's update. However, enough progress has been made to justify another update.

The most important update this week has been the story progress: The second hub of chapter 2 has been set up and the first (of four) negotiation side-story has been completed. I estimate about 5-6 more days of writing to finish chapter 2. Chapter 3 will be more linear, though with a lot more branches than chapter 1, and chapter 4 will effectively just be a "consequences" chapter.

To accommodate my plans for chapter 3, I have modified the inventory commands to allow pulling their values from other inventory items, rather than just being hard-coded in the tiac. For example, !ifaddinventory::leaders_remaining<=0::recruited::side_stories_completed will add the current value of side_stories_completed inventory item to the item recruited's count, but only if there are no more leaders to speak to. I've also changed the replace commands so that they can use inventory counts as well, by enclosing the item name in square brackets. For example, !ifreplace::coins>=1::COIN_REPLACE::and [coins] coins will replace the text COIN_REPLACE with "and 20 coins" if the player has 20 coins.

While the user-facing content has not seen much change, I have added the ability to restart from the beginning of a specific chapter, rather than always restarting from the very start of the story. This will be useful when you're deep in chapter 3 and die because you took the wrong path and got ambushed.

On the backend side, I have finally decided to just remove both analysis tools (story and music). They were useful at the beginning, but the sheer complexity of the new behaviors mean the tools would require far too much work to match the logic. Removing the story analysis tool was definitely more painful, as it means I now have to manually count the words leading up to choices in order to make bank-limited choices reasonable. To accommodate that, I have the banks reset at the beginning of each chapter. I have an idea for a "high-score" system to replace the joy of seeing those bank counts rise to ridiculous amounts, but that will be for later.

The next important code update will bring dynamic challenge word definitions. As it currently stands, SPIKE and CHANGE have hard-coded behaviors. This both makes it more difficult to maintain, and impossible for modders to add their own challenge words. So I have begun work on defining the challenge words SPIKE, GHOST, SHADOW, and EXPLOSIVE via JSON files, rather than hard-coding them. That will be the main code work for next week, while the story work will be focused on finishing chapter 2 and adding in the ghost challenge words.

Raw Git Log

• achievement and mod updates

  • updated verbiage for achievement 011 to "Type It All" for an in-joke
  • removed unnecessary "triggers_needed" from the achievements files
  • added achievement 200 (untriggered so far) for the tailor dirty scene
  • updated verbiage in mod mini-story achievements to omit the fact they're in the sample mod (making them semi-hidden)
  • updated verbiage in mod mini-story based on feedback from WiW

• split up sections in options main menu

  • instead of just having a "Settings" section, we now have a section for each type of option; this is to address the fact that the game now has a lot of options, and the section paragraph is too large on small screens

• removed music analysis and fixed story analysis

  • music analysis tool has been broken since the music rework; I've given up on adjusting it for the new logic, as it was never very useful anyways
  • adjust story analysis tool to handle loops by recording the non-bank inventories at each bookmark choice and checking for same-inventory on loops; if the player ever has the same non-bank inventory when reaching the same bookmark, they're in an infinite loop; the game doesn't prevent this, in case the player wants this state, but the analysis tool now breaks out

• writing: added greeter intro and first visit to second hub

• modified inventory commands to allow copied values

  • the quantity param in each inventory command can now be another item name; if so, the inventory value for that item is used as the quantity for this command
  • similarly, text-replacement commands can now include inventory values by enclosing an item name in square brackets
  • added ifremoveinventory text command
  • updated documentation accordingly

• added ability to restart from a chapter

  • added previous_chapters field to Story chapter metadata
  • added RESTART_CHAPTER word command
  • updated StoryManager.reset_progress and Story.reset_progress to accept a new from_chapter key; the story reset will now reset all chapters except those which are ancestors of the from_chapter, and will then attempt to set that chapter as the active chapter
  • added actions in the OptionsChapter to allow resetting from a specific chapter (only chapters with non-empty inventories are considered valid for this)
  • when going to a new chapter, Story now checks the previous_chapters field array and pulls the first non-empty inventory to copy to the new chapter
  • renamed sample mod's chapters to avoid confusion with the main story

• added Util.log

  • added Util.log which just prints what is passed to it
  • changed all print statements to use this new Util.log
  • this is because I use print for debugging, but generally want to remove all these debugging statements once I'm done, so do a global search for "print"; but I also want to use stdout for proper logging

• writing: began H2SS01, Jane's recruitment side-story

• SSH key-handling changes

• improved build automation

  • created script to handle uploading to Steam/itch via CLI; skipping doing this via CI/CD because of the amount of extra work to put steamcmd in a GitLab CI runner

• writing: set up bargaining with Jane and first (terrible) option

• began work on per-chapter story analysis

  • changed tia/tiac loaders and objects to correctly use "filename" and "filepath" variables (instead of storing filepath in 'filename')
  • changed checkbox list in StoryAnalysisEngine to a grid of labels (and checkboxes), with each chapter getting a checkbox
  • SAE is currently in a broken state, as I attempt to figure out a reasonable way of handling the geometric growth of possibilities

• gave up on Story Analysis tool

  • the combinatorial explosion that is the hubs of chapter 2 means that, even if I could figure out a way to reduce the final output of the analysis tool to something usable, it would take forever to run; so I'm giving up on that for now
  • to reduce the difficulty of determining appropriate word counts for limited choices in chapter 2, I've changed the "copy inventory from previous chapter" logic to zero out the word/letter banks; this means that the player's word/letter count will not carry over between chapters; unfortunate, but basically necessary
  • removed story analysis tool code and scene
  • after manually counting the expected previous words, updated the word/letter-limited choices in chapter 2; will definitely need to test these once I get around to regular testing of chapter 2

• created dynamic challenge word definitions

  • created new Challenge class which contains information about a challenge word type
  • challenge word types are loaded from JSON like the other custom data
  • defined the SPIKE, GHOST, SHADOW, and EXPLOSIVE challenge word types
  • these currently do nothing, but will later be hooked up to replace the current hard-coded WordCommands

• writing: finished Jane's side-story

• fixed call issue with DebugState

  • when I renamed Chapter._get_progress to Chapter.get_progress, I forgot to update the call in DebugState; fixed