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2026-08-30 To Type a Tale devlog

Nearing story completion

published: Sun 30 August 2026
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This week involved finishing the story for chapter 3 and the finalizing of all achievements. As a bonus, I put together a guide for unlocking all the achievements.

There are now 28 achievements: 8 achievements for activating/defusing the 4 challenge word types, 2 for the modding mini-story, 3 miscellaneous achievements, 2 for chapter 1's endings, 3 for various choices in chapter 2, 6 difficult ones for chapter 3, and 4 "hidden" achievements for chapter 4's endings. I may tweak the icons or verbiage of some of them, but they are otherwise in their final release state. The only ones not hooked up in the tiacs are chapter 4's achievements, as that hasn't been written yet.

To help with unlocking all these achievements, I put together a guide in the Steam community page with hints and solutions for each achievement. It's not public yet, as no one can unlock the Steam achievements anyways, but I'll make it public (and post a similar guide to the Itch page) prior to release.

Chapter 3 has been written! Specifically, all of the side-stories and main path text have been written. I still need to add a bunch of challenge words, but that shouldn't take more than a day. The real time-consuming tasks will be verifying all the path logic works as expected and... creating music. I'm probably going to hold off on both of those tasks until I have chapter 4 written, so I can do all the testing and music in one continuous week.

Here's a sample from chapter 3 to whet your appetite:

The southern hostile grabs their crossbow and immediately fires at Tarra, who is slightly closer due to running on all fours. He manages to dodge to the side, but the bolt still rips through his right foreclaw. Surprising even you, he then bunches up and performs a Nefarran Advance, a short-flight maneuver banned in most HIA training schools because of the high risk of permanent injury due to the wings being used both for the flight and for pushing off the ground.

The maneuver is successful in the sense that he manages to launch himself the remaining distance and knock down — then tear the throat out of — the hostile who shot him. Unfortunately, the other hostile has sufficient reaction time to aim their crossbow and fire a bolt straight through his skull.

You roar and tackle them to the ground, repeatedly smacking their head against the loose rocks until they go limp (the Kuna would be proud). Your chest heaving and pheromones spraying, you cross over to Tarra and brush the scales between his foreclaw joints. He died performing a necessary duty outside his purview and will be honored.

I also finally got around to adding a "non-typist mode" option. Enabling this will treat all newly-generated paragraphs as already completed, allowing you to progress through the story with significantly less typing. It also drastically increases the timeout length for resetting your typing streak (and bringing the stamp down). I strongly recommend you don't use this mode unless you are really bad at typing, as the game was balanced around you typing a bunch.

Next week will be focused on chapter 4 and maybe dabbling in some music for chapter 2.

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