Hey folks,

I'm going to start writing blog posts every week or so as I make changes to Storyfall to keep everyone updated.

Some exciting news happened: I announced Storyfall on Reddit and the intfiction forums, and received a much stronger response than I was anticipating! Some of it was negative, and some positive. Either way I'm happy people responded, and I appreciate everyone's feedback - the saddest thing for an engineer is to build something that nobody uses or cares about. One of the co-founders of Choice of Games even responded and was encouraging!

One of the negative responses I got repeatedly, especially on Reddit, was about the inclusion of AI writing assistance features. I assumed most people would either find them useful or be indifferent, but it turns out merely having those features was stirring up quite a controversy and turning off writers, so I scrapped them. I've only left AI image generation capabilities.

Over the last few days I've:

Added an entirely new writer feedback system. Readers can now leave writers feedback directly from the game page (for published stories). Writers see the feedback show up in their editor, and can mark it as acknowledged or delete it.
Added a search function to the editor. I was running into issues editing one of my stories - I wanted to quickly jump to a specific scene but was struggling to find it just jumping around. The search function now saves a bunch of time!
Added scene effects. Now you can mutate variables upon entry to a scene, not just when clicking on a choice. This can save you time having to add the same effect to multiple choices leading to the same scene.
Overhauled the teams UX and fixed a bunch of bugs with team invitations, emails, and notifications.
Continued investigating whether Stripe Direct or Destination charges would be best,
Started working on Storyfall docs (these aren't ready yet!),
Fixed various issues on mobile (e.g. the "Variables" button was not showing up in the editor),
Added a "skeleton" loader for the editor,
NPCs and Factions can now be set as discovered by default, rather than having to discover them through a choice effect.
Added the story export button into the story settings modal to make it more obvious to find.
Improved story restart text.
Various other bugs fixed I can't remember anymore, plus miscellaneous UI improvements.

Let me know if you find these kinds of updates interesting!

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