2026-05-31 To Type a Tale devlog

The first thing you'll notice this week is right there in the title: I've changed the name of the game to To Type a Tale! This was after several asynchronous brainstorming sessions with Matthew, and it hopefully won't change again. The main downside to changing the name right now is that your savefile won't transfer (i.e. any progress and settings are lost), but it will become much more difficult once I release the public demo.

The second thing you'll notice is that I've started adding graphics. Right now, I only have a half-implemented background for the text and a fully-implemented stamp to deal with collected words, but it will eventually be a full desk setting. Speaking of the stamp, that's the fun new feature to look at this week: instead of words disappearing after flying to the bank section, they now land in a jumbled pile on top of the bank text. After a period of inactivity, a stamp comes down (notice the branding), erases the jumbled words, and updates the bank counts.

There is also the major change to how text is collected. In previous builds, words would not be collected until you paused long enough (depending on WPM setting) and then they'd all be collected at once. This was... fine, but I wanted something that felt more dynamic. So now words are immediately collected as soon as they are typed, but you can still type a wall of rainbow (even easier, now that the pause before resetting is much longer). Right now, words you are actively typing, typed/collected words, flying words, and jumbled words are all rainbow highlighted. This can lead to some major noise issues, but I have a plan for solving that, too! If you want to call down the stamp early (and thus, reset the highlighting), you can now press the Enter key to do so.

My friend Squish has been very helpful in quickly testing these insane new features and pointing out where they feel bad to play. She is responsible for the flight paths of the words not overlapping typing text, typed words remaining highlighted, and several other bugs too numerous to mention here.

Some smaller changes that you might notice include the daily builds getting the demo flag, WPM/LPM calculations changing (again), a new first-restart message, and some tutorial improvements. Builds with the demo flag cannot proceed beyond chapter 1 (it pops up a message about where to wishlist the game) and I'll have to figure out how to distribute full builds to my beta-testers eventually. The WPM calculations are hopefully better now that I'm using word-collection timings instead of the reset timer. When restarting the story after a bad end (the only kind available right now) for the first time, you'll get a message about meta-progress and how collected words/letters affect choice availability. Finally, the tutorial has been reworked again to hopefully emphasize some mechanics that my alpha-testers did not understand (e.g. nextpage being how you progress).

I have also started in on separating the save files for options, stories, and chapters into separate files. This is to help with organization, but also to enable larger save data for the chapters, as I will soon be reworking them so that typing progress is preserved between play sessions.

The game is currently in a partially-broken state due to the rework and larger tickets taking multiple days, but please make sure to keep reporting issues! It should be back to fully playable by the end of next week, but then I'm putting code work on the backburner until I get my marketing materials put together.