2026-05-24 Type It All devlog

A lot less visible progress this week than last, but still plenty. The big user-facing changes this week are some tutorial improvements and meta-progress. The backend changes involve improvements (and additions) to the analysis tools I use to help with content creation. Finally, I've started on the marketing research, which also sparked some existential worrying regarding the lack of art.

The game now starts with an intro message to introduce the player to the basic concept of interaction and the tutorial has been reworked to emphasize this interaction. Per a request from Matthew, the tutorial now de-emphasizes speed, and even no longer has a reference to BPM affecting choices. The tutorial now also emphasizes accessibility options like typing speed adjustments and font sizes.

The tutorial also now has some music. It's only basic percussion, but still sets the mood. I have some notes from Dad about various instruments I can include in the main music, so I'll be working on that in the coming weeks.

The player now has some more interaction options to change the behavior: meta-progress allowing faster playthroughs and command-line args to access hidden features. After typing 90% of a paragraph, that paragraph is marked "pre-completed" and will be automatically collected on subsequent playthroughs. The player can change whether 100% or 70% (i.e. minimum) of the letters/words are collected via an option. The player now also has access to the analysis tools and debug mode via command-line args: --debug=true to launch debug mode, --scene=story to launch the story analysis tool, and --scene=music to launch the music analysis tool. The meta-progress has several exploits, but I'll figure out fixes for those later.

I finally changed the boot splash and app icon. They are currently using the GSS logo, but I'll probably change them to TIA/TTaT-specific logos eventually.

The backend has also seen some improvements, including fixing the story analysis tool after the major rework, implementing the music analysis tool, and other, smaller fixes. While fixing the story analysis tool, I decided to also add some progress bars so I can track whether it's actually doing anything. The music analysis tool is used to see where a player typing at a constant rate would hear a specific music track. This will be used to fine-tune the logic behind how those tracks fade in and out. On the main scene side, I fixed a tutorial bug that was introduced by the major rework and reported by Matthew. This had identical behavior to a different bug that I had noticed and squashed before the rework, but had a completely different root cause.

Story changes have been minimal. The first chapter of the crin tale had some edits to introduce more currency-conditionals. The tutorial was reworked to use proper paging instead of custom bookmarks, to better match the expected interaction in the crin tale.

And then there's the marketing. I poked around in Steam's library to find some other typing-heavy games, read through their descriptions, and browsed their screenshots. Unfortunately, this caused me to start worrying about the complete lack of graphics in my game, so I got sidetracked into experimenting with dynamic graphics generation on Sunday. I might refine and finish implementation of this in some form, or might just toss it out and hope the game is interesting enough without graphics.

Next week is likely to be more of the same: minor tweaks, getting sidetracked by graphics, and market research. I want to avoid releasing my demo during June, as there will be a lot of internet focus on the Next Fest demos, and I won't be a part of those yet. If I finish all my code/graphics work before July, I'll begin work on prototyping other games.