Custom Narrative Stories

Whats up everyone! This update brings in the first phase of support for a much requested feature: custom narrative stories.

What's new? ​

We're looking to do this in increments for a few reasons:

• We want to be sure we get this up and running for you all as smoothly as possible
• We want to make sure the authorship experience for these is good (as honestly I'm not convinced that authoring them in game wouldn't be a slog)
• We don't want to focus on the wrong features here without letting you all tell us what would serve you all best

So what's coming along for this round? Mainly, two things:

• We now support dropping custom stories in your local content folder (typically located in your documents) right next to your locally stored keeb files. The game will pick up anything you save with the right extension (*.story.json, i.e.: 'example.story.json')
• We've released a schema file that will help you author these in your editor of choice in our schema repo, and have included an example story file.

This means that for now the path to making your own stories is to write a story file with the phrases laid out the way you like and drop them in your documents folder. That does make it a little more obscure than our keeb editor of course, but I think working your way through inputting phrases and sections just the way you like entirely in game might be a bit of a chore. We might look into more tooling in the future for people to edit these, but again wanted to start with the simplest option here, while ensuring we give you all the most control. If you take the example file and make a copy of it, it should be pretty easy to set up a story with the sections and phrases exactly how you would like. Doing this in an editor like VSCode will automatically verify your work against the released schema and let you know if anything isn't quite right as you go along.

One small tip while you're doing that: we've kept all of our internal stories down to ten sections to simplify the timer UI; you might run into some wonkiness if you go past that. If a bunch of people want to have more sections we'll work on making that more robust in the future!

Of note, the way things are set up under the hood is that we create a hash from the narrative stories and make a leaderboard for said hash. That means that if you change the content of a story, that goes to a different leaderboard. This is aimed towards preventing any funny business around editing stories to get better times and so on.

Also of note: something not included in this release is workshop support for these. We will eventually have a similar pipeline to our custom legend workshop flow, but for now we've just gone with this first step to iron out any kinks here. Once we feel confident about all of this, workshop support for these will follow soon after.

That's it for this one! Let us know if you all run into any bugs, and thanks again! Typing Simulator Dev Team