Smarter Dialogues & Improved Tagging System

This update introduces three major improvements:

1. A rebuilt dialogue system with multi-speaker support, active highlighting, and faster editing tools. Developed with direct feedback from the Talescape community.
2. New character pose workflow, allowing reusable expressions, global updates, portrait overrides, and quick syncing between dialogue lines.
3. A redesigned tagging system for the marketplace, built around Emotions, Genres, and Topics. Emotions are now a two-way system between Bards and Dreamers.

The editor is now significantly faster, clearer, and better prepared for longer stories and professional workflows.

Version: App: v0.6.0 - API: v0.8.0-0f9caaa

The dialogue system has undergone the largest structural redesign so far. Instead of assuming a single active speaker per line, Talescape now supports scenes where multiple characters are present, each with their own pose, placement, and visibility state. This change was developed directly with feedback from the community.

The new features include:

• Multiple characters per line
• Active speaker highlighting
• Per-speaker pose selection
• Collapsible speaker lists
• Better previews in the editing panel
• Character syncing between lines (explained below)

The structure is now stable enough to support advanced dialogue workflows without needing another redesign later.

The new character pose system focuses on convenience and speed, not complexity. In many editors, expression management becomes tedious quickly, especially in large dialogues. Talescape now streamlines this process.

Reusability

You define poses inside the character editor (for example: Neutral, Angry, Surprised).
Updating a pose image there updates it everywhere it is used, automatically.

This prevents drifting styles and saves time when improving character artwork.

One-off portraits still supported

If you prefer not to use poses, you can continue selecting manual portrait images on each dialogue line.
This is ideal for:

• temporary expressions
• experimental scenes
• placeholder art during early drafts

Poses are optional, not mandatory.

Line syncing

One of the most helpful improvements is the ability to sync characters between dialogue lines. If a character appears in multiple consecutive lines, Talescape can carry over:

• their presence
• their current pose
• their placement

This removes the repetitive clicking common in VN editors and makes editing long conversations much faster.

Why this matters

The goal is to reduce friction. Stories with many expressions or multiple characters on screen should not become harder to author just because the scene is visually complex.

A major addition to the marketplace workflow is the redesigned tagging system. Instead of a single generic tag list, Talescape now uses three structured layers: Emotions, Genres & Topics.

Each serves a different purpose.

Emotions

This is the biggest conceptual change. Emotions are not just descriptors. They form a two-way communication system between Bards and Dreamers.

• Bards select the emotions they intend to evoke.
• Dreamers select the emotions they actually felt when leaving reviews.

The Bard’s dashboard then shows alignment or misalignment between intention and reader experience. This is especially useful for:

• serialized works evolving over many chapters
• tonal experimentation
• refining pacing and atmosphere

Genres

Genres describe the structural type of the story:
adventure, dystopian, romance, psychological, slice of life, etc.

Genres are used for filtering and discovery.

Topics

Topics describe what the story is about, independent of genre:
loneliness, identity, climate, folklore, community, memory, local history.

Separating Genres and Topics prevents noisy tag lists and makes story discovery more accurate.

Alongside the major systems, several quality-of-life improvements were added:

• Optimized the media browser & upload workflow
• Clearer selectors for models and events
• Adjustments to the Checks system to match the new dialogue and pose workflows
• Small but important behavioral fixes

These changes make the editor more coherent and predictable, especially for Bards working on larger stories.

The upcoming phases will focus on:

• Optimizing and stream lining the scene editor
• Finalizing the publishing workflow
• Connecting validated releases directly to the marketplace
• Preparing for closed testing with the first invited Bards
• Preparing mobile and Steam builds for broader preview access