Letterbound

A short branching visual novel with a typewriter dialogue engine, built with Spinel and sdl — a demo of the sdl bindings' text-rendering path.

Requirements

• Spinel (spin)
• SDL3, statically linked via the sdl package — no brew install needed at build or run time

Install Spinel

With asdf:

asdf plugin add spinel https://github.com/jockofcode/asdf-spinel
asdf install spinel master
asdf set -u spinel master   # make it the default (~/.tool-versions)

Or build it from source:

git clone https://github.com/matz/spinel.git
cd spinel
make
export PATH="$PWD/bin:$PATH"
cd -

Play

spin run letterbound

Or build first and run the binary directly:

spin build
./build/bin/letterbound

Controls

Key / Action	Effect
Space / Click	Reveal full line instantly, then advance to the next line
Click a choice box	Pick that branch
R	Restart from the beginning
Esc / Q	Quit

About

A lighthouse keeper's last night before the light goes automated, told across three fonts: VT323 for the narrator's log, Public Sans for spoken dialogue, and JetBrains Mono for a running terminal log of the choices you've made. One real branch point, three endings.