IMS Creators Desktop 0.9.4: the update where your project learned to talk

Your project now has its own MCP server

This is the big one, and it's a little magical 🪄

You know how modern AI tools can connect to your files, your databases, your whole setup through something called MCP? Until now, your game design project sat on the other side of that bridge. No more. The desktop app now carries a small MCP server inside itself, and it opens a door to your project whenever you want.

Any MCP-capable client — an AI assistant, an AI editor, whatever tool you already use — can connect to an open project and actually work with it. It can look at the list of characters, open a dialogue, read a location's description, create a new asset, rename a workspace. Not by guessing what your project looks like, but by reading it like a book that's written for it.

The server lives only on your machine, only while the app is running, and only on a local address you control. We added a whole tab in Settings where you can set the port, decide whether the server starts together with a project, watch its status, restart it, and copy the connection URL with a single click. That URL is the key: point your AI at it, and the project opens up.

Here's how it looks in practice, with OpenCode. Turn the MCP server on in Settings, copy the MCP URL, then drop an opencode.json into the root of your project:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "mcp": {
    "ims-desktop": {
      "type": "remote",
      "url": "{{MCP URL HERE}}",
      "enabled": true,
      "oauth": false,
      "timeout": 10000
    }
  },
  "permission": {
    "external_directory": {
      "{{PROJECT DIR HERE}}**": "allow"
    }
  }
}

That's the whole setup: your AI now has the project open right in front of it — characters, dialogues, locations, everything — ready to help you work.

One thing to say clearly, so nobody worries: the MCP server is absolutely optional. It sits quietly in Settings, off by default, and never gets in your way. Everything you've always done in IMS Creators — drawing dialogue graphs, writing design docs, organizing assets with your own hands — works exactly as before. The door to your project only opens when you want it to. MCP is an extra path, not a replacement for any of the old ones.

Meet the AI assistant

The MCP server is the bridge to your own tools, but there's now a door that's always open: the AI assistant panel right inside the app. You don't need to set up a server, configure a client, or leave the workspace at all. Ask a question, give a command, watch it edit your dialogue — the same AI magic, with none of the wiring.

Where does it live? A little sparkles icon in the top bar, one click away. It opens as a resizable panel right next to your work, remembers the width you chose, and stays out of the way when you don't need it.

And how does it work? It works with your project directly, the same way you do. Ask it about your data and it answers from your own files: it can list the assets and workspaces, read a character or a location in full, create a new asset, change a dialogue, search for anything by query. Not by guessing — by reading the project itself.

And the assistant is not locked to one brain. We support seven providers out of the box: Ollama, Gemini, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Grok, DeepSeek, and a Custom option for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and work with your usual AI provider

We didn't stop at the desktop either. The same panel, with the same tools, appeared in the cloud version of IMS Creators — so whether you work in the app or in the browser, your assistant is right there.

One honest warning for cloud users who like local models. Ollama lives on your computer, but your browser runs the cloud version on a different origin — and browsers enforce CORS, so they'll politely block the request. The fix is quick: tell Ollama to trust https://ims.cr5.space. On Windows, set the OLLAMA_ORIGINS environment variable to https://ims.cr5.space (restart Ollama after); on Linux and macOS, run Ollama with OLLAMA_ORIGINS=https://ims.cr5.space before launching it — or add the same line to your service config. A few minutes of setup, and your local model works in the cloud app too.

Markdown grew a little kinder

The markdown block received two quiet but very welcome upgrades.

First, front matter. If you've ever touched a static site generator, you know the ritual: the little --- block at the top of a document with key: value pairs. It's wonderful until you have to edit it by hand. Now those fields get their own neat little editor — add metadata to a design doc without remembering a single YAML rule.

Second — tables. Not the "write pipes and pray" kind. Real tables. Click a cell and type in it. Tab to jump to the next one. Press Ctrl+Shift+T to summon a fresh table out of thin air. Editing a big table in plain markdown used to be a small daily sorrow. Now it feels almost like a spreadsheet, and that's a sentence we're happy to write.

And the little things

Some fixes are the kind you don't notice until you need them desperately:

• Error messages in the app are now selectable. Yes, finally — you can copy that cryptic "something went wrong" line and send it to us.
• The Linux build got its environment settings sorted out, so AppImage packages are assembled the way they should be.
• Markdown documents that are long, rambling, full of tables and anchors and images — the kind you actually write — now process reliably.

None of this screams from the screen. A lot of it happened quietly, under the hood. But we think the moment you'll feel it is the moment you ask your AI assistant to open your dialogue for review, and instead of a guess, you get understanding.

That's the update. As always, we'd love to hear what you think — what works, what's missing, what you'd like next. Join us on Discord (https://discord.gg/xPTmUZR9) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61569739761148), send feedback through the form at https://ims.cr5.space/en/feedback, or drop into the Telegram chat (https://t.me/imscreators_en). Good luck with your game demos. See you in the next one!