Since the launch of German Chat Stories last year I’ve been toying around with various ideas and genres that might fit this format.
One idea that has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while was to do something in the fantasy genre. It came with some interesting implications. If knights and sorcerers used instant messaging apps, what would they talk about? And what “technology” would they use to facilitate these chats?
Well, you can find out for yourselves in my latest story “Die Kugel”. Like the other stories, it’s completely free:
In terms of vocabulary difficulty this one is probably slightly more challenging than the others, but it’s also rather short, which should balance out nicely.
Notes And Considerations
I’ve built a new feature that I call “dynamic quizzes”. In previous stories, there were predefined “checkpoints” where you could do quizzes about words and phrases you interacted with. For this new story, quizzes can now appear at any time during the story, or even be turned off completely if you just want to read/listen to the chat messages. (Quizzes can always be re-enabled in 
settings.)
Some other tweaks include various performance tweaks and making the default chat speed just a tiny bit quicker, so there is less downtime between messages. Keep in mind that you can customize that in your settings as well.
Also, there was a bug where changing the speed while messages were running would sometimes prevent the next message from showing up. This should be fixed now by applying the new speed settings with a bit of a delay.
Last but not least, while not directly related, this story and the new code was written as part of an experiment to change my desktop environment for a few weeks, ditching Windows and relying on open source operating system and tools only. If you’re interested in these types of things you can read about it on my personal blog.
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