Atmospheres, Lighting & Animated Scenes

This release focuses on movement, mood and reusable presentation tools. Atmospheres can now be prepared once and shared across scenes, while dynamic lighting gives Bards more control over what remains visible in darker moments.

Dialogue characters and scene elements can move too. Short speaker animations add emphasis to individual lines, while looping element animations help static objects feel more alive. There is also a first experimental workflow for generating promotional videos from your story images and music.

Version: App: v0.20.0 - API: v0.21.0-8890b605

Atmospheres combine visual ambience with optional environmental audio. You can now create an Atmosphere Preset at story level and attach it to as many normal scenes as needed. When you update the preset, every scene using it receives the same settings. This is useful for recurring weather, locations or moods that should stay consistent across a story.

A scene can still have its own custom atmosphere when an effect only belongs in one place. The scene editor lets you choose between no atmosphere, an existing preset or a custom atmosphere while previewing the effect over the current background.

When consecutive scenes use the same preset, Talescape keeps it running instead of restarting the effect and ambience audio during the transition. Atmospheres can also be started or stopped with actions, so the weather or mood can change while the Dreamer remains in the same scene. Scene music stays separate from atmosphere ambience.

Scenes can now use a tinted lighting overlay to darken the background and elements. Point lights reveal circular or oval areas, while Spot lights create directional beams. Each light can be positioned and resized directly in the scene editor.

Intensity controls how strongly a light cuts through the overlay, and softness controls how gradually its edge fades. Lights also support color, opacity, rotation, ordering, visibility conditions and the same animation settings as other scene elements. This makes them useful for lanterns, windows, moonlight, searchlights or brief flashes triggered by story logic.

The system is intentionally simple and stylized. It does not calculate shadows, occlusion or physically simulated colored light. The goal is to shape attention and mood without turning scene setup into a 3D-lighting workflow. Learn more in the Scene Editor documentation.

Default-style dialogue lines can now animate the active speaker when a line begins. These are short, one-shot effects that add emotion or emphasis without changing the dialogue graph:

• Emphasis: a short scale pulse.
• Shake: a quick horizontal shake.
• Tremble: a smaller nervous jitter.
• Recoil: a backward jolt that returns to the original position.
• Bounce: a vertical bounce.
• Sway: a side-to-side motion.
• Flash: a brief tint flash.

The animation applies only to the active speaker. Portrait position and scale remain separate settings and can still change between lines. Chat, phone-call and terminal dialogue styles do not show this option yet. See the Dialogues documentation for the full dialogue workflow.

Scene elements now support simple looping motion and opacity effects. Rotate spins an element, Blink fades it in and out, Flicker adds irregular opacity changes, Pulse gently changes its scale and Bob moves it vertically.

Each preset exposes only the controls it needs, such as speed, direction, minimum opacity, scale or distance. This keeps common ambient effects quick to configure while still allowing them to match the pace of a scene.

Animations affect the visible content without moving the element's layout or interaction area. Conditions, ordering, visibility and interaction behavior continue to work from the element's original position, even while its artwork pulses, rotates or bobs.

The Videos section in Story Settings is an experimental tool for creating promotional videos from media already prepared for your story page.

You can select a template, background music and volume, an optional intro image and an ordered set of screenshots. Screenshots can include captions, while the intro text is generated from the story title, Dream Type and author name. The service is starting with a few distinct templates, with more to be added over time.

Create Video requests a trailer and Create Short requests a shorter version. Generated videos appear as preview cards where you can refresh their status, download completed renders or delete them. Video settings must be saved before a render can be requested.

This feature is still in testing. Rendering can take some time, and the result depends heavily on the screenshots, music and presentation supplied by the Bard. The workflow and available templates may change as feedback comes in.

Story-scoped variables can now be marked as Remembered. Their values are stored for the Dreamer and become the starting values when they begin a new playthrough of the same story.

This gives Bards a foundation for stories that acknowledge what happened before. A later playthrough can react to an earlier ending, preserve a discovery, unlock a new route or gradually reveal more of the story without requiring the Dreamer to continue an existing savegame.

Remembered values apply when a new playthrough is created. Existing savegames continue to use the values already stored inside that save, so enabling the setting does not rewrite an active run. Read more in the Variables documentation.

• AI-use disclosure was simplified into one clear setting and a text field.
• Dashboard layouts and story carousels were refined for different screen sizes.
• Notifications, authentication recovery and several smaller interface details are more reliable.
• Translations were updated across the app.
• Fixed an issue that could interrupt asset-pack imports.