Bring Your Stories to Life with Cinematic Audio
Voice acting, layered sound, reader-controlled audio, smarter frame progression, and support for stories up to 1,000 frames make Story Thyme's biggest storytelling update yet.
Storytelling Just Became More Cinematic
Story Thyme v1.18.0 is our biggest storytelling update yet, giving creators powerful new tools to build richer, more immersive experiences.
From full voice acting and layered audio to smarter frame progression and dramatically larger stories, this update is designed to make interactive storytelling feel more alive than ever before.
🎙️ Voice Acting Has Arrived
Stories can now include fully voiced dialogue and narration using the brand-new Voice layer.
Voice playback is completely independent from music and sound effects, allowing every scene to combine narration, character dialogue, background music, ambient sounds, and effects simultaneously.
- Dedicated Voice layer for narration and dialogue
- Independent Voice volume control
- Supports AI-generated or recorded voice acting
- Works seamlessly alongside every other audio layer
🎵 Four Independent Audio Layers
Story Thyme now supports four simultaneous audio layers that can all play together:
- 🎼 Music
- 🌧️ Ambience
- 🎙️ Voice
- 💥 Sound Effects
Each layer has its own playback behavior and volume settings, allowing creators to build rich soundscapes that dramatically enhance the atmosphere of every scene.
⏳ Wait for Audio
Timed frames are now smarter than ever.
Instead of advancing after a fixed number of seconds, frames can now wait until audio playback has finished before automatically continuing.
You can choose to wait for:
- Voice dialogue
- Sound effects
- Non-looping music
- Non-looping ambience
This allows conversations, dramatic reveals, emotional moments, and cinematic scenes to flow naturally without requiring readers to click through every line.
🎚️ Personalized Reader Audio Controls
Every reader enjoys stories differently.
Some prefer full voice acting. Others like reading dialogue themselves while keeping the music and ambience.
The Theater now includes separate volume controls for:
- Music
- Ambience
- Voice
- Sound Effects
These controls work as a multiplier on top of the author's intended mix, preserving the creator's audio balancing while giving readers complete control over their own listening experience.
Reader preferences are remembered across stories, so once you set your preferred audio levels, Story Thyme remembers them.
📖 Bigger Stories Than Ever
Many creators have been reaching Story Thyme's previous story size limits.
With v1.18.0, the maximum story size has been increased to 1,000 frames per story, giving authors dramatically more room for branching narratives, longer visual novels, and expansive adventures.
Whether you're creating a short interactive story or a sprawling multi-hour experience, Story Thyme now gives you far more space to bring your ideas to life.
🛡️ A More Reliable Storytelling Platform
In addition to the new features, v1.18.0 includes numerous improvements behind the scenes to make Story Thyme even more reliable.
- Improved audio playback reliability
- Smoother music and ambience volume transitions
- More reliable cinematic scene transitions
- Improved frame creation and deletion handling
- Better editor Voice workflow and preview playback
- Protection against deleting audio resources that are still in use by stories
- Improved handling of unpublished Unlisted stories
Many of these improvements happen behind the scenes, but together they make creating and reading stories smoother and more dependable than ever before.
Available Now
Story Thyme v1.18.0 is available now for all creators.
Whether you're building a fully voice-acted visual novel, an atmospheric horror adventure, a cinematic sci-fi epic, or a relaxing slice-of-life story, the new audio system opens up entirely new possibilities for interactive storytelling.
We can't wait to see—and hear—what you create.