articy:draft

I visited GDC Europe, where I talked with guys from Nevigo. They are producing a desing tool for game designers, designed by designers. articy:draft is basically a tool for creating branching and networking story lines and dialogues, but I decided to test it for a bit different purposes too. The beta test period of it started around September 2011 and I got accepted to the program.

I have to say I love the way articy:draft works. It clearly is designed by game designer, and it may be the first job-specific tool for us. Since it still is in beta, there are some features missing, but I've liked using the software very much. Designing the structures for the puzzles and for the whole game has been a joy - even if the program crashes every now and then.

Since the articy:draft is made for dialog and story development, it has some limitations that I have had to overcome. One of them is the locations of inputs and outputs of nodes. Inputs are always on the left, outputs on the right. As After Now Archeology's structure is three-folding spiral, I had to do some adaptations. Well, here is a screenshot of the flow of the game in articy:draft.

What is nice with articy:draft is that I can double-click any of the puzzles in the flow chart, and dig deeper into the actual puzzle. Here is an example of one of the puzzle structures.

As you can see, I use articy:draft in not very structured way. There are certain rules I try to obey, but for me, articy:draft is kind of recursive post-it board with wires between the stickers. I use some color coding in my designs, dark green being the initial story, brown/orange are the puzzles, blues are some extra stuff and the last green one is the answer. Yellow notes are hints (I am going to have a hint system to avoid you getting stuck) and the red one is an idea for a hardcore-mode.

It is also very nice, that articy:draft exports the whole game design as a XML-file. If I was doing a story-driven game, I could just import the ready made XML into my game and parse it for dialogs and scene structures. Hopefully there will be a .jpg or .pdf exporter for the visual version too, since it would be really nice to print out all the structures, not just the content.

Beside the articy:draft designs, I have started updating more traditional game design document. Since it contains quite a lot of spoilers, I am not going to paste it here, but maybe I'll write something about it too in the future.