Follow me, I know the way!

Unfortunately, I have to postpone the release of Talescape once again.

The good news first: Talescape itself is basically finished.

The editor works. The player works. Publishing works. Most of my work on the platform now consists of fixing bugs, improving things that get on my nerves when I actually use it and adding new features here and there.

The problem has less to do with the platform itself and more with everything around it.

My own work situation has become a little less certain. Since Talescape is funded entirely independently, I currently need to be a bit more careful about how much of my own money I put into it.

So for now, I’ll have to do some of that work myself instead of hiring people as originally planned.

And that brings us to the current problem: Stories

A story platform without (enough) content would probably be a slightly questionable launch strategy.

I want Talescape to launch with a decent selection of different stories that you can actually play. And producing that content takes considerably longer than I originally thought.

Writing is only one part of it. There’s also artwork, putting everything together in the editor, testing, revisions and all the little things you only notice when a script actually becomes a playable story.

That’s where most of the work is shifting right now.

That’s why I’ve now moved the planned release to Q4 2026.

I’m deliberately holding off on giving a more specific date for now. The remaining time mostly depends on content production at this point, and I’d rather give myself enough room to finish the first stories properly than have to write this exact article again in a few months.

Maybe this is also a good time to explain something a bit more fundamental.

Someone once told me, more or less, that I was crazy to still build a platform like this entirely by hand these days. When anyone with the right tools can throw together some SaaS in a week.

And in a way, he even had a point.

If my only goal were to make money as efficiently as possible, a storytelling platform I built myself probably wouldn’t be the best idea.

Talescape exists because I wanted to build it.

It’s a passion project in a fairly literal sense.

I love working on it. I like the systems behind it. I like solving new problems and seeing how neatly so many things now fit together. The technical foundation has reached a point where new features are incredibly easy to implement. All that time I spent on the architecture is paying off.

And honestly, I think Talescape could end up being something like my personal magnum opus.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to bet my entire financial future on it.

That’s simply not how I work.

I’m more the kind of person who takes things slowly and thinks them through. I think about a solution, try to understand the consequences and then put it into practice. I don’t put everything on red and hope for the best.

And I think that approach suits Talescape.

If the platform is going to be around for a long time, it needs to be built and run sustainably. Burning through my savings just to release a few months earlier wouldn’t make Talescape a better project.

It would just leave me a lot more stressed.

I don’t expect Talescape to ever make me rich either.

If the platform eventually covers its own costs, I’ll already consider that an enormous success.

What I actually want is something else:
I want to be able to keep developing Talescape for as long as possible.

Ideally, in some form, for the rest of my productive life.

That might sound a little grand, but that’s exactly how I see the project. It doesn’t need to explode. It doesn’t need to become huge within a year.

It just needs to exist, grow and get better over time.

Talescape isn’t standing still, of course.

Quite the opposite: producing my own stories is probably the best test the editor has had so far.

I regularly find bugs, clumsy workflows or things that sounded great in theory and suddenly feel a lot less great the tenth time I use them.

That keeps leading to improvements, both small and large.

So the technical focus right now is mainly on bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements and features that come directly out of actual story production.

And I’ll also be showing more of the first stories this month.

Journey without Return is getting close to completion. I’ll be showing more of it soon, along with some of the other stories currently being made for launch.

If you’d like to try Talescape in its current state, you still can. The beta is available on both Steam and itch.io. You can try the editor, build your own story and break things.

And now that I’ve spent half an article writing about how Talescape needs more stories, I should probably show at least one of them.

So to wrap things up, here’s a first look at Journey without Return (the text is still in German for now).

I still think I have a pretty good idea of where I want to take Talescape and how to get there.

Apparently, I just got the travel time a little wrong.