I'm excited to introduce you to Custom Community Stories!

You can now create your very own story and play it in the game! The new Custom Community Stories work similarly to mods without all the code, you can create your own stories and share them with your friends! Custom Community Stories are located within the "Stories" folder (located beside the game .exe). Custom Stories are in a JSON format and MUST have the ".ScaryStories" file extension.

To create a new Custom Story simply go to the "Stories" folder and you can either copy, paste and rename an existing Story and then edit it or you can create a new text file (.txt) and create your Story. Copy/Pasting is recommended for beginners, if you have experience with JSON you may want to create one from scratch. Once you are ready to test your Custom Story, you can rename the file to include to now use the ".ScaryStory" file extension (change ".txt" to ".ScaryStory"). Now you can run the game and everything works correctly you should see your Custom Story at the bottom of the Stories Menu. If your story is not on the menu, try hitting "F1" and see if it reports any issues.

Custom Community Stories can also be spotlighted (will be included by default in all future versions) so be sure to post your stories here on itch.io for me (and everyone else) to see! I've spotlighted the 3AM story by Jamie Rose so, that will be included when you download the latest version. Feel free to use this template when creating your own but be sure to create a new copy of the story/rename the file as spolighted community stories are overwritten (with the story) when the game runs.

Stories are reloaded every time you hit the "Select Stories" button on the main menu, this means you can create & test your Custom Stories in real-time without restarting the game. 

A new in-game console!

Also included in this update is the new in-game Console! You can access this at any time (after reaching the main menu) by pressing "F1", this Console will report back/log things the game does including when it tries to read Custom Community Stories. This should help debug your Custom Stories during the creation process.

I would love to create a knowledgebase for how to create stories if there is a demand for it so let me know what you think and if you have any issues feel free to reach out!

Example Custom Story: