Hey everyone,

This past month has had a lot of exciting updates to Storyfall! I've brought quite a few important features people have been requesting and fixed a bunch of bugs.

Multiplayer

Storyfall now has two multiplayer modes! Vote-based and coop.

Vote-based multiplayer is plug & play, any regular single-player game can become vote-based. Writers don't need to do anything to add support for this mode, readers can simply select it when playing any published story. Anyone can host a multiplayer game (even guests), and there's a live chat. You can have as many people join as you want, and you play by voting on which choices to take.

Co-op multiplayer games. This mode is super powerful, but requires work from the writer. Writers will need to enable it in their settings, and then create at least two characters for readers to play as. Characters can have inter-twining stories, optional sync points (such as a dungeon door, where players wait for everyone to get there before proceeding), individual and party variables, and dynamic text that changes in scenes based on what characters are there and what character the player is playing as.

To start a multiplayer game, just click the little arrow button next to "Read" and select "Play Multiplayer".

Characters

Related to the above, Characters are also a new feature for singleplayer games. You can use them for different purposes. For instance, you could have a class system, where a player chooses to be a Mage, a Warrior, etc. You can either display a character-selection screen at the start of the game, or set characters based on player choices later on (via new choice effects). Characters can have their own NPC and faction standings, their own starting variables (so a Lord can start wealthy, a rogue poor), etc. You could also have characters represent different people, for instance, play as John, or Judy, and have them start in different parts of your story, have scenes and choices that are only accessible to specific characters, etc.

I also updated the story tree to have a character-specific filter, so you can click on a character and see a highlight of all the scenes and choices they have access to, making it easy to trace paths through your story. The story tree now also supports multiple start points (previously all stories had to have a single "root" scene), now you can specify a starting points per character. This allows you to build out backstories for different characters, for instance.

Twine and Ink imports

Twine and Ink stories can now be imported into Storyfall! We support Chapbook, Harlowe, and SugarCube formats for Twine. Note that this is still in beta, as not everything maps perfectly yet, and some stories might need some clean-up after being imported. Still, this should make the process of transitioning your story into Storyfall much easier than before. You could import your Twine story, clean it up, publish it, and now it's a multiplayer-capable game with no extra work!

Export your story as standalone HTML

Folks have been requesting HTML exports, so I obliged. In addition to the existing JSON export feature (which lets you backup your Storyfall stories), you can now export fully playable HTML stories, that can be played offline or hosted on your own website. Storyfall can now be used as a standalone authoring tool, and then you can backup or host your stories anywhere you like. They even have dark and light mode support :)

The first page of an exported HTML story.

Internationalization support

Storyfall now fully supports internationalization (i18n)! This feature was pretty complicated, but I'm happy with how it turned out. I noticed that, even though 90% of traffic to Storyfall is from English-speaking countries, 3 out of the 5 stories published so far are actually not in English. We had an interesting assortment of Arabic, Spanish, and Kazakh. I wanted these to be accessible to everyone, and after testing out several modern browsers I realized that auto-translation doesn't really work well anywhere except in Chrome (which is spyware, don't use it!).

So I built a full manual and automated translation system. Writers are now prompted to pick the primary language their story will be written in, and can now add manual translations if they want to. Storyfall supports translated titles, descriptions, chapter names, variable names, NPC names, factions, characters, scenes, and choices. So basically everything that the reader would see (except tags, I missed that one!). Alternatively, if you either don't feel like translating your story, or don't know the language you want to translate it into, you can click the magic hand button and an LLM will do it for you in a matter of seconds (yes, it's free for you). You can also generate an automated translation and then go back and edit it.

I went ahead and translated "The White Room" into 5 major languages in less than 2 minutes. You can now share your interactive fiction stories with the whole world! I've also added a full tag and filter system for readers to know what languages stories are in, and to be able to pick which original or translated language they want to play. Readers can pick before starting a story, and switch at any time while playing.

Variable images

Variables, NPCs, Factions, and Characters now support images! Bring your story to life by uploading (or generating) images which readers can see in their stats page, or in scenes where you can embed images, e.g. the avatar for a given NPC.

Docs

To help newcomers, I've added a comprehensive and searchable set of docs, together with screenshots. In the same vein, Storyfall now has story tutorials. When you go to create a new story, there's now an optional dropdown where you can select one of several short story templates/tutorials. These are playable (in draft mode) and are meant to demonstrate the use of variables, NPCs, etc. You can't publish them but you can use them to learn more about Storyfall. I also improved the in-editor tutorial (that pops up for new users) to be more helpful.

Editor improvements and conditional blocks

The scene editor now supports slash / embeds, so you can type /h2 and add an H2 header, for instance. I also added /if conditional blocks. These are embeds that let you wrap anything else in a condition. They're a more powerful version of conditional variables. So instead of {gold > 20: You are rich.} you can now display entire blocks of text, images, or even nested /if conditionals inside a conditional /if block.

AND/OR conditionals

I've improved both variables {} and conditional /if blocks to now support complex conditionals. If you type in { and start building conditional text, you'll now get the option of adding as many AND or OR conditions as you want!

Re-design

I've been inspired by some changes Apple has made with iOS 26 (no, not the excessive transparency that makes it hard to read buttons), and spent a bit of time re-designing the interface. The editor has been slightly re-designed and looks more modern. Everything has more rounded corners and feels friendlier and more "bubbly" than before (well, I hope anyway).

I also figured out a way to use the colors in cover images writers upload for stories and create a similarly colored gradient background for the entire story details page!

I'm still working my way through all the pages so some might still have elements of the old design until I find them.

The navbar and tab groups on various pages are now fancier and more intuitive to use on mobile. In addition to clicking the buttons you can also drag. This is purely an aesthetic improvement, but it's nice to play around with. Sometimes it's fun to work on non-practical features :P

Screen Recording 2026-02-23 at 07.37.01.gif

I got feedback from a user that the function interface (conditional effects) was unintuitive, so I overhauled that.

Other features

You can now organize variables into folders to help with larger stories.
Drag & drop variables, NPCs, factions, and characters directly into your story scenes, then just click the embed to edit what it does.
Story loading in the editor has been improved. I've optimized a bunch of SQL queries and reduced loading time by almost 100x for larger stories. I also added a cool Tron-inspired loading animation.
Image loading optimizations - previously I was loading full resolution images on every page load, even just for a tiny user avatar. Now I'm storing both the original full resolution images and smaller versions, and picking which one to load based on the actual size of the image. This should make the entire website snappier. In my tests it reduced load times for the /stories page 8-fold and reduced bandwidth used by about 12 times.
Image generation optimization - OpenAI is very slow at image generation. Even their latest model takes 30-45 seconds to generate a cover image, NPC avatar, etc. so I've now switched to Grok, which takes an average of 3-4 seconds and generates the same quality images. Now you can feasibly give all your NPCs faces in just a couple of minutes.
I've been working on refactoring my Stripe integration and getting that closer to being launch-ready. I still have more work and testing here, but I'm hoping to enable the monetization features in the coming month or two.
I've overhauled the various QA panels in the editor and the spellcheck panel and put them all into a new "Review" panel, which has several tabs. This panel also contains various other automated QA checkers that look for things like unused variables, dead ends, orphaned scenes - that kind of thing.

As always, feel free to hop on over to the Discord channel and chat!

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