Building is planning, and plans go wrong. Here are five times we were caught off guard.
1. The AI ending wasn't what we thought
We thought: an AI ending needs to close things, give a conclusion, wrap up the story. We wrote prompts in that direction. Result: bombastic, cliché endings ("and they lived happily ever after") that were downright bad.
Then we reversed it: "Write maximum 2 sentences that connect directly to the very last action. No summary. No moral." Suddenly the endings were exactly right. Sometimes better than human writers would manage.
2. Players love the silent AI
We thought players would want AI features on by default. Turned out: most players found Classic mode (no AI) almost as enjoyable as Comedy. Not because they didn't want AI — but because the chaos of purely human chain sentences has something of its own.
That's why Classic is now a fully-fledged mode, not an afterthought.
3. Lobby silence is deadly
When the first two players are sitting in a lobby and the third takes a while to join, those first two feel awkward. They drop off. We've seen this happen three times in tests.
Solution: in Solo mode we immediately add bot portraits to the lobby so it always feels "full." In multiplayer, a chat emoji row has been introduced — just so people can wave while they wait.
4. The book theme changed everything
The first UI was a chat app. Functional. Nobody found it cosy. Then we made it a book — leather cover on the homepage, page flips between rounds, title page with portraits — and the feedback shifted from "it works" to "it's fun." Same game, different wrapper.
5. People use it differently than we thought
We built Storytale for groups of friends on an evening. It gets used at weddings, in classrooms, by families with grandparents and grandchildren, and — surprisingly — by lonely people who play in Solo mode against the bots because it gives them company.
That last use case I hadn't anticipated. It makes me feel something warm, honestly.