Bardwall: turning revision history into a storytelling game

Beta-bot is an AI beta reader and writing application that I have been building for fiction writers. Most of the application is deliberately practical: you organize books into chapters, write in an editor, maintain wiki pages, generate summaries, and ask different AI reviewer profiles for feedback.

Recently I added something much less practical to it. There is now a button labeled Enter Bardwall.

Bardwall is a town nestled in haunted woods. The ghosts outside the town once fed on human life force, but the townspeople discovered that the energy of a story can satisfy them instead. There is always a line of bards waiting to perform in a stone amphitheater in the forest. The town has only one rule: the story must go on.

The longer a bard tells stories, the more coin they can earn. Coin pays for a room at the inn, food at the market, coffee and pastries, and entry into storytelling challenges. A bard without enough coin can sleep in a tent outside the walls, although a night in the forest is not as restorative.

The idea is intentionally a little ridiculous. Writing a book is a noble and unreasonable undertaking, so I wanted the application to contain a place that treats it that way.

The revision system came first

Bardwall grew out of a more conventional feature: chapter revision history.

Beta-bot now creates a revision whenever a writer saves an edited chapter. This is not a snapshot for every changed word or keystroke. A save is treated as a meaningful checkpoint.

The chapter page shows those saved versions in chronological order. A writer can open a revision to see a GitHub-style diff, switch between unified and side-by-side views, and compare what was added and removed. Revisions can also be deliberately discarded without erasing the fact that they once existed.

The same history powers an activity heat map for the book. Clicking a day reveals which chapters changed, how many words were added or removed, and whether a chapter was deleted. From there, the writer can open the relevant revision and inspect the actual diff.

Revision history is useful on its own. It makes progress more legible, provides a way to recover earlier language, and records the substantial rewriting that a simple current word count can hide. A chapter can become shorter while representing a tremendous amount of work.

It also gave Bardwall something important: a trustworthy record of what the writer had actually written.

Feeding real work to the ghosts

When you visit the stone amphitheater, Bardwall does not ask you to type disposable words into a separate productivity box. Instead, it looks at your recent chapter revisions.

You choose a recent save and select passages from its diff—the words you added or substantially revised during your normal work on the book. Those are the passages your bard tells to the assembled ghosts.

In other words, progress made in the ordinary, non-gamified part of Beta-bot becomes food for the ghosts in the game.

I like this connection because the game is downstream from the writing rather than competing with it. You do not advance by clicking repeatedly, checking off an unrelated habit, or producing filler solely to satisfy a counter. You edit the real chapter. You save it. The revision system records what changed. Then Bardwall gives that work a second life inside the fiction of the town.

At the beginning of each day in Bardwall, the player chooses a daily word-count goal. Reaching that goal through eligible revision passages earns enough coin for one night at the inn. Exceeding it can earn more. Falling short does not doom the town—another bard will always step forward to keep the ghosts fed—but it may mean sleeping in the tent and spending carefully at the market.

The game adds stakes without pretending that missing a writing goal is a moral failure.

A town built around storytelling

Once I had the amphitheater, the rest of Bardwall began accumulating around it.

The Crooked Lantern Inn offers a warm bed, rumors, and advice. The night market sells food and flowers. The Moth & Mortar apothecary treats illnesses acquired through extremely inadvisable cave games. An inventory tracks provisions, while hunger and energy affect how the bard feels the following day.

In the town square there is a shrine to Heliconia, goddess of lost causes and unwinnable games. If the bard places a flower on the shrine, Heliconia appears in person and reveals a hidden cave in the woods. She warns that some games can be played there, but none can be won.

One cave game is The Wyrm's Courtesy. A courteous dragonlike creature promises its hoard to anyone who drinks the correct potion. Every potion makes the player ill. Another is The Game of the Last Word, a collaborative story that the cave will always continue after the player's contribution. The stories persist between visits and can become long, but the cave can never allow the bard to finish one.

There is also the Ink & Ember Coffeehouse, where bards buy coffee and pastries and wager coin or food in short storytelling contests. Players choose a word-count class, draft three symbolic cards as prompts, and write against another bard. The judge values concrete scenes, character agency, narrative movement, craft, and meaningful prompt integration. Both competitors have to stay within the same word-count range.

These activities are more overtly playful than the amphitheater, but they orbit the same basic idea: stories are not decoration in Bardwall. They are labor, nourishment, currency, danger, hospitality, and magic.

Why connect revision history to a game?

Writing progress is difficult to represent honestly.

A rising word count is satisfying, but it leaves out revision. Cutting 1,000 words from a chapter may be more valuable than adding 1,000. Rewriting the same scene several times can produce only a modest change in final length. Some of the hardest days end with a shorter manuscript.

The revision system records that hidden work. The heat map makes it visible over time. Bardwall then takes the next step and gives it an imaginative meaning.

I do not want the game to replace the writing application or turn every creative decision into points. The editor, chapter history, diffs, and heat map all remain useful without entering Bardwall at all. The game is an optional layer for writers who find it delightful to imagine that the passage they revised today might keep a haunted town alive tonight.

That is the relationship I want between the two sides of Beta-bot. The practical side respects the manuscript as work. Bardwall respects the same manuscript as magic.