tarinoi 🔜 AdventureX

We're building Tarinoi - an integrated narrative design and production toolkit for game studios of all sizes - intended for anybody making a game where the words matter. Take a look at tarinoi-works.com - if you're a studio or narrative designer interested in helping us develop it, drop us a line!

"There are times you want to narrow down your search to something very specific: any card where Threshold is "heroic," or any cards that reference both the SetFlag function and the "met_ferryman" variable. We built a second, server-driven advanced search that lets you do just this kind of thing."

The funniest/saddest reaction to this amazing article has been people going "wait, Stellaris has WRITERS?" Yes folks, if a game has words... someone probably got paid to write them... even if that game isn't an RPG or a visual novel...

What should go in the Big Menu? Inspired by @rystorm.com 's article reminding us that Sensible Defaults Do Not Exist, and that tool UIs should be customisable for different workflows, swap in the controls and shortcuts you need, and swap out the ones you aren't using right now #tooldesign #indiedev

Heads up! Only 25% of #AdvX26 tickets remain. Reserve your spot at the UK’s convention dedicated to narrative and adventure gaming! Grab your ticket now at buytickets.at/adventurexconferencescic/2339289. Find games and talks information, schedule and FAQs at adventurexpo.org.

Keep your cards close with our graph shortcuts - one for different node types, another for your entities. The default card for an entity can be customised as well, so they're ready to go with a click. Added or removed entities from this board? Sync up! #narrativedesign #uiux #toolsdev #gamedev

As we prepare for our closed beta, here's a peek at our latest Release Notes - major changes, bug fixes and everything in between. We're implementing your suggestions, tightening up the interactions and user journeys and adding extra quality-of-life improvements. #narrativedesign #gamedev

As we prepare for our closed beta, here's a peek at our latest Release Notes - major changes, bug fixes and everything in between. We're implementing your suggestions, tightening up the interactions and user journeys and adding extra quality-of-life improvements. #narrativedesign #gamedev

Sometimes you have to compromise to make conflicting requirements work. We want Tarinoi to be unopinionated, but we also want you to be able to see how your story reacts to game state, without leaving the app. Here's how we squared that circle. #gamedev #tooldev tarinoi-works.com/blog/game-st...

Sometimes you have to compromise to make conflicting requirements work. We want Tarinoi to be unopinionated, but we also want you to be able to see how your story reacts to game state, without leaving the app. Here's how we squared that circle. #gamedev #tooldev tarinoi-works.com/blog/game-st...

We understand that the little details matter - so we've added alignment guides which show up when dragging and snapping your nodes into place. #uiux #gamedev #narrativedesign

We understand that the little details matter - so we've added alignment guides which show up when dragging and snapping your nodes into place. #uiux #gamedev #narrativedesign

Goals 🏆

Did some profiling, tuning, and optimisation on the Kubernetes cluster running Tarinoi. Got downloads working about 25% faster, plus it blocks the thread less so the it scales significantly better to many concurrent users doing big downloads all at the same time. #tooldev #webdev #gamedev

I hate devops so much I automated all of it for Tarinoi, and couldn't resist telling everybody. Read more here: tarinoi-works.com/blog/joy-of-... #devops #webdev #tooldev #gamedev

We've been gathering feedback from early users, and we got one message loud and clear: it'd be neat to be able to preview flows based on game state. We found a solution which gets about 90% there, enough for early work – and doesn't lock you out from rolling your own. #gamedev #tooldev

Thanks to our demos and user feedback, we've been getting a lot of new questions about what Tarinoi is - and isn't. Let's clear up a few things and, if we aren't quite the right fit for your project, look at the alternatives. #gamedev #toolsdev tarinoi-works.com/blog/what-ta...

Thanks to our demos and user feedback, we've been getting a lot of new questions about what Tarinoi is - and isn't. Let's clear up a few things and, if we aren't quite the right fit for your project, look at the alternatives. #gamedev #toolsdev tarinoi-works.com/blog/what-ta...

Lot of talk these days about shipping early, scrappy and half-baked. That's not really our style. Here's how we're building for performance, resilience and scale. #webdev #gamedev tarinoi-works.com/blog/under-p...

Thanks for everyone who's reached out to get a demo of our early build, offer feedback and help us shape the app! We have a newsletter signup here on our site www.tarinoi.com, and we'll keep you up to date with where we're at in development. #narrativedesign

Thanks for everyone who's reached out to get a demo of our early build, offer feedback and help us shape the app! We have a newsletter signup here on our site www.tarinoi.com, and we'll keep you up to date with where we're at in development. #narrativedesign

Thinking about how to tutorialise Tarinoi... #gamedev #narrativedesign

I wrote something about engineering secure software systems, Tarinoi in particular. It's not a task, it's a continuous process and set of practices, and it's also a really big topic -- but here's something at least! #gamedev #saas #security tarinoi-works.com/blog/securit...

AAA Narrative Design is maybe 20% writing things and 80% working with the team to find a shared vision, then keep it on track through development.

It's bin day! 🗑️ Amongst all this bin talk, we took a little side-quest and cleaned up our Recycle Bin. Not yet committed your work? Rummage through the trash to find those gems, or confirm what's really going to be lost forever when you do. Always time to change your mind!

Tarinoi will be at #AdvX26 ! Looking forward to chatting all things narrative.

We made a pretty nifty advanced search in Tarinoi that lets you zero in on your needle however big your haystack. I love a happy database that makes complex queries on big datasets really fast. Postgres is amazing when set up right. #narrativedesign #gamedev tarinoi-works.com/blog/advance...

"There are times you want to narrow down your search to something very specific: any card where Threshold is "heroic," or any cards that reference both the SetFlag function and the "met_ferryman" variable. We built a second, server-driven advanced search that lets you do just this kind of thing."

SEO magic. "Tarinoi" is Finnish for "tell a story!" Consequently, the AI summary delivers both the site link - and a tale about a lighthouse on a windy skerry, a lantern that never goes out, and a whale bringing a mysterious letter in a sea chest strapped to its back. I mean... that's unique 🐳🇫🇮

Working on a test data generator for scalability tests and such. It's rather refreshing to see good old-fashioned nonsense generated by a Markov chain rather than an LLM.

Celebrate narrative games w/ our first-ever CHOICES MATTER FEST on Steam! AUGUST 10 - 17th: It’s stacked with... 🪧40+ Demos 🪧Behind-the-scenes content 🪧Interviews 🪧A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type quiz 🪧Exclusive announcements 🪧TWO WORLD PREMIERES (not ours) 🪧…and discounts on 90 featured games!

Game projects often share some DNA, and if they’re sequels, DLCs, or the same game system, they might have a lot in common. With Tarinoi, you can select the shared parts to create project templates so you don’t have to start from zero every time. #gamewriting #narrativedesign #gamedev #indiedev

Creating this platform from scratch means we put a lot of energy and thought into the core architectural design. We could draw from our experience, revisit scenarios and edge cases, and tailor it to support the new vision -and in a collaborative app like this, sync is a fascinating problem to solve.

Although Tarinoi is a webapp built for real-time collaboration, we decided to make it offline-first from the start. It wasn't trivial but it is so very much worth it. I wrote up a devblog about it. tarinoi-works.com/blog/offline...

We've started to use Tarinoi to design Tarinoi, instead of Miro. It's pretty handy. For example, here's a helicopter view of our top-level UI components and how they relate to each other. We're using it to figure out a better way to navigate around the app. #narrativedesign #softwaredevelopment

Colour isn't just decoration - it's how we communicate with our users. Here's a look at our use of colour in Tarinoi, as part of a carefully considered user experience that encourages exploration, highlights reliability and guides you through the journey. tarinoi-works.com/blog/how-we-...

Every tool has its limits. We want to push Tarinoi's out far enough that you never have to think about them. It should never be the bottleneck. Here's how we got our boards to stay fluid with 10,000 cards – more than we'd expect to see in any real project. #gamedev tarinoi-works.com/blog/ten-tho...

Tarinoi is not only designed to support you when you refactor, we're also there to help you update references and connect alternatives 🔧 Worried you missed something - or want to tackle things manually? Run the Healthcheck to flag and correct mismatches and maintain project coherence.

I know our “industry” is on fire right now, and it feels odd to share positive news. But talented folks like Mike keep creating singular experiences like Vampirium: 1997 - and the only way out of this mess, really, is to continue creating.

We need more weird 🔥

Yeah ok, I’m doing this. Here is some advice for aspiring game writers. Do not come into games wanting to be a game writer with the attitude that all you are going to write are the cinematics. Fact: a game’s story is not about the cinematics. 🧵

A good game writer works cross-discipline to bring an interactive story to life to offer the player an experience. And cinematics are just ONE SMALL PART OF THAT. Ambient conversations, one-liners for banter, barks for combat, weapons descriptions, codex entries, emails, etc.

We're big fans of the General Data Protection Regulation. No, seriously. We are. It protects some really important rights, and we engineered compliance with it deep into Tarinoi. If you're curious, here's a devblog on some of the ways we approached it. #gamedev tarinoi-works.com/blog/built-i...

Lot of talk these days about shipping early, scrappy and half-baked. That's not really our style. Here's how we're building for performance, resilience and scale. #webdev #gamedev tarinoi-works.com/blog/under-p...

We're working on the plugins that get your content into the game - traverse dialogues, evaluate conditions and trigger logic, bound to in-engine implementations. You can use them as-is, or modify and build on them - we'll be releasing these under a permissive open-source licence. #narrativedesign