Hey folks,

We've got some exciting new updates with Storyfall over the past month, but before I get into those, I also wanted to announce that a new story has been published yesterday.

The prologue for Dead Fever, a zombie survival game, is now playable! I quite enjoyed it, and have to admit I went down the worst possible path in the first playthrough, which is kind of embarrassing, hah. PanOut is working on chapter 1 which I'm excited to play when it comes out. As always, you can hop into our Discord to discuss.

Now, onto the new features!

Real-time Collaborative Editor

Storyfall now supports a real-time collaborative editor. When you invite someone to your team as a writer to collaborate on a story, you can both open the editor at the same time and any changes you make are synced! There's live cursors that show where the other writer is editing, and if they're on a different scene from you, you can quickly jump there to see what they're doing. Think Google Docs but for interactive fiction.

You get a scene revision history with diffs authored by whoever made the change, and you can comment on text and discuss things in threads, just like a chat!

If you’re not editing live, any comments left by other team members will end up in your regular in-app notifications dropdown, and in your email, depending on how you setup your notification preferences. I'm considering hosting a game jam in the future that requires submitted stories to have been written by at least two writers. Might be fun!

Restore Previous Scene Versions

If you've ever lost your work and wanted to get it back, Storyfall now makes this easier than ever.

The editor already supported ctrl/cmd+z to undo if you accidentally deleted something you didn't want to, but what if you navigated to another page or closed your tab? We now store previous versions of your scenes (with diff highlighting!) which let you restore any lost work, or just to get back to a previous version if you're not happy with the changes you made.

Comment System

I added two new comment systems.

You can add comments in-line, just by typing // in the editor. Only the writer can see this, and it's a handy way to help keep track of things.
You can also highlight text, and a "Comment" button will appear. Click it, and you can leave comments on that specific text. They'll appear in a new comments panel in the sidebar. Comments are created as threads that you (or anyone you're collaborating with) can add messages to, and comment threads can be resolved or deleted.

Global Triggers

I'm currently writing a story in which the character is stuck on a spaceship that’s running out of air. Every time you go to a new scene/room, the number of minutes of oxygen remaining is decremented. Eventually, if you don’t fix the ship in time, you run out of air and die. Since this can happen in any of dozens of scenes, I needed a global trigger. One that would trigger in any scene as soon as a condition was met (in this case, suffocation leading to an end scene).

Triggers are different from scene entry effects and choice effects because they can cause any effect throughout the story (change a variable, play a sound, redirect to a specific scene, etc.) and happen for any kind of condition you want. It’s basically a global rule/function with redirect support.

This is only a very minor spoiler so I’m sharing what my triggers look like for my story:

There’s two. One that decrements minutes of oxygen remaining in every scene, and one that redirects to the suffocation scene if fewer than 1 minute of oxygen remain. Unless you fix life support, and then you’re safe… for now.

Tags and Dynamic Choices

I've added a tag and tag property system. The basic idea is that some variables, NPCs, etc. might have some shared characteristics. For instance, if I'm building out a game that has a food inventory, I might create variables like:

"Canned Chicken"
"Energy Bar"
"Chocolate"

I can then create a tag called "Food", and within it, add tag properties like "satiety" and "morale boost". These are basically nested variables under the hood.

Whenever I assign the tag "Food" to a variable like "Canned Chicken", that variable now automatically gets those properties too. So now "Canned Chicken", "Energy Bar", etc. all get "satiety" and "morale boost" properties, which you can set to whatever you want.

To go alongside this, I've also added dynamic choice generation. You'd pick this in the same place where you pick other choice types (continue, input, interact, etc.) and you can then select a tag (e.g. "Food") that corresponds to this choice. What'll happen is that when a reader gets to this scene, every variable with that tag (e.g. all the food items you created) get added as choices dynamically. So if you have 20 food items, you don't need to go and manually create choices for each one. And every time you add new food items, they get auto-added to your dynamic choice list.

Tags can also be set to be consumable or not. If they're consumable, the quantity of that variable (e.g. "Canned Chicken") will go down by whatever consume amount you've set (by default 1).

You can create choice effects for the dynamic choice type via the standard "fx" button. You'll see a new "Tag Prop" setting which lets you assign the effect "satiety" to hunger, or "morale boost" to a happiness variable. Also, if a tag is consumable and the reader has none of that item, the choice won't appear for them anymore.

Story Tree Effect Visualizer

When you open the Story Tree, you can now instantly see any scene effects and choice effects associated with any of the nodes and edges in your story, making it easier to visually track what's going on without having to click into each scene. You can also toggle this off if needed.

I also improved some of the choice overlap logic in the Story Tree so if you have multiple choices re-converging back to the same scene, they move out of each others' way and you can actually read what they say.

Back Choice Types

To make it easier to manage inventory screens, specific rooms that you re-visit, computer terminal home screens, or whatever else your story requires, I've added a new choice type: Back. Back choices will dynamically go back to whichever scene you came from.

Monetization Improvements

The monetization feature is basically 99% complete at this point and I'm planning to flip the switch soon and enable it after one more round of testing. In addition to various bug fixes I also added discount codes, which allow writers to create discounts with expiration times.

I also added a whole new monetization avenue: characters can now be sold via micro-payments. So for instance you could have several characters in your story, some free, some paid. Paid characters could have entirely different branching narratives, back stories, stats, etc.

Also guests can now checkout and buy stories without having to register, though they will need to provide an email during checkout so they don't lose access to their purchase.

Other New Features

Vote-based multiplayer games now properly support input choices. All the players can input whatever text they want in phase 1, and it then moves onto phase 2 where everyone can vote on which input they want to go with.
Hovering over a user's avatar or name in various places will now pop up a hover card with additional details like their bio and any badges they've earned.
I've made various improvements to the event system. I'm hoping to host a game jam soon!
Added an internal notes field to variables, NPCs, factions, and characters, allowing you to write notes only visible to the author.

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