It's been a couple of months since the last dev diary. With the game jam concluded I thought now would be a good time to announce several exciting updates!

iOS App

Storyfall now has an iOS App in the App Store! The app has the full capabilities of Storyfall's website, from playing games to creating them, as well as the ability to download games for offline play. The full power of the editor is available, and you can just pinch to zoom out to the story tree, and click to go back into a scene.

Please download the app and let me know what you think! I plan to continue adding features, and as always user feedback will drive the direction of the app.

An Android app is on the way and should launch in the next few weeks.

Chat and Friend System

You can now direct message other users on Storyfall, ignore or block DM requests, as well as add friends (your friend list is private). For added security, you can enable End-to-End encryption in your chat settings.

Monetization

Monetization is live! I'm happy to announce I've been able to offer monetization to writers outside the U.S. too. You can connect your Stripe account if you're in one of about two dozen countries supported by Stripe connect. Sales are still only to readers in the U.S. for now due to sales tax compliance.

You can sell your story, individual chapters within a story, characters within a story, or recurring subscriptions to you as a writer (which can unlock access to stories or custom forums).

Whatever price you set will be reflected on the web, but automatically increase by about 15% to anyone using the iOS app to account for Apple's platform fee. That way your anticipated revenue will be unchanged, regardless of where readers buy your content.

The first content for sale on Storyfall is chapter 2 of Dead Fever, which was just released a few days ago. Check it out!

Visual Novels

Storyfall now supports Visual Novel mode! You can enable this in your editor for as many scenes as you want, and set up a background, sprites with animations, and dialogue that's revealed one paragraph at a time. You can also highlight text and set the background and sprites that should render for that specific line of dialogue. I made a simple one-page example story here.

Audio Improvements

As part of the visual novel feature launch, I also improved audio handling, with advanced capabilities like custom fade-in and fade-out settings that are reflected on the waveform. HTML exported games (which you can host on Itch or any other website) also properly support audio and visual novel mode now.

Everything is Faster

I've spent a good few weeks optimizing Storyfall. Choices made in stories are now instant because the entire story and game engine downloads to your browser when you first start it. There's also no more latency with switching between scenes and making changes in the editor - everything is saved to your browser the moment you make a change, and synced to Storyfall in the background.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements!

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