2026-04-19 Type It All devlog

This week marks the first full week of development since August 2025 and thus is the perfect time to start doing devlogs again.

The major user-facing changes this week were improvements to blue-command processing and the addition of music. The major backend improvements include a debug window and a massive reorganization of how MainText works.

Blue commands are the major interactive element of the game, so having multiple blue words in a single line is to be expected. Unfortunately, my old method of handling that was to just execute all of them if you typed multiple. The new version only executes the first encountered. I may eventually change it to have priorities so that "obvious" choices are fired over "default" choices like typing all the text on the screen.

The current music is effectively a placeholder, but still sounds decent. I eventually aim to have custom songs for each chapter of the story (and possibly custom songs for each act of Hamlet). I don't think all of the tracks are currently achievable with the text I have available to type, but enough is triggerable to get the feel of it.

The debug window allows me to see which music tracks have been triggered, and also to mute the music (so I can listen to something better while coding). I'm considering adding debug builds to my regular daily builds. Let me know if you want this! (daily builds are, as always, available at files.greyshadowsoftware.com)

Finally, MainText got an overhaul to add per-paragraph command words and bookmarks. I essentially had to retool how text is processed at the start as well as how it is stored and accessed throughout the lifetime of a MainText object. MainText can also now provide several paragraphs and does so based on the size of the game window.

Next week is going to be fixing a few bugs and then delving into actual content creation, with a goal of producing roughly 250 words of story each day (to meet the goal of 8000 by mid-May).