We are building a web tool for game and story design - Looking for feedback

Hi everyone,

We are a team of two working for the past few months on a project and we would be very happy to hear your opinion / feedback on the ideas behind it. The project is called Arcweave and it is a web-based flowchart-like tool to design, organize and scale game design and story content.

It all started 6 months ago, when after a few game jams we decided to start working on a bigger game project. I began writing the GDD on a google doc but very soon found out that i was in need of additional features to properly maintain and scale my game design. I wanted to be able to:

- Develop branching storylines and dialogue in a visual and easily readable format
- Write things down for my characters, locations, items e.t.c and easily access this information from different parts of the story
- Create an overview of the game and then "dive" in each part of the story and start fleshing out the details
- Share my progress with the other members of the team so that they could comment on it and give me feedback.

Based on these needs we looked around for a tool that did something like this but could not find anything close to our requirements, so we decided to build it ourselves. Fast forward 6 months and here are some screenshots of how the tool looks so far:







We plan on releasing a closed beta in a few weeks. Τhe MVP will initially support the following:

- Create and connect story elements in a flowchart layout and add labels on the connections

- Multi-select, copy/cut/paste elements

- Create components (e.g. characters, locations, items) and add image/text inputs in them

- Attach components to elements

- Mention a component inside the story content using the @ character (mentioned components dynamically change when they are renamed)

- Create multiple boards

- Attach boards to elements for quick access.

- Create multiple projects

- Autosave projects/boards on the cloud

We are looking forward to your comments, ideas and feedback. Also we greatly welcome any suggestions as to if/how you would like this tool to move forward and how it could help your workflow, as well as if you would like to participate in the closed beta stage.

Finally if you want to get notified on the progress updates follow the project on Twitter here: @arcweave

Cheers!

 

Looks nice! What are your plans for getting data from this tool into engines such as Unity? Are you planning a data format such as JSON or XML?

 

It does look really nice, great work.

While writing our game the most important things have been speed / rapid editing, and the ability to both focus on smaller pieces and have a good overview of the whole project.

We've been using lots of tools, but the one we use the most is Workflowy. It allows us to rapidly create and reorganise information. Our process starts messy and disorganised, so we need a way to quickly capture ideas and notes and then shape it into something.

So I'd say anything you can include that enables quick outlining and editing would be advantageous.

Side note: the best thing about Google Docs is the ability for multiple users to work concurrently and get real-time updates. I can only imagine this would be horrible to implement, but we really miss it when working in any other online application.

 

Hi Tony! Yes, our first priority is to provide a JSON export functionality with options. We are also considering implementing an API at a later stage for custom syncing with Unity or project management tools.

 

Hi @flashframe thanks for the feedback!

We are also big fans of Workflowy I must admit i had never thought of using it in writing game scripts and scenarios, however now that you mentionεd it it makes total sense due to its speed and its ability to focus on specific "Pages". We also aim for Arcweave to be fast, easy to use and provide the option to focus on specific parts of the story. We want to make an environment that facilitates quick and rough sketching of ideas in a visual way that can be scaled without the need to jump to a different tool.

I totally agree on Google Docs advantage for collaboration, this is a must have for a design application that aims to connect everyone on the same page. Our plan is to support sharing of project and boards in the beginning and implement next year real time collaboration features with commenting, versioning e.t.c.

 

I bet you could make a decent amount of money if you had a version that people could license to run on their own local/business servers.

I mean, I would absolutely pay for that. I'm not super trusting of cloud services because of my unreliable internet, but this also looks like a fantastic bit of kit to add to my workflow.

 

@zanzavar - You're probably already familiar with articy:draft since this looks similar, but it's something to compare for features. (@Murgilod - articy has a multi-user version that you can run on your own server, but it's priced for businesses, not individuals or hobbyists.)

 

Hi @Murgilod thanks for the feedback! Setting up a standalone application to run locally is something we are considering as well, but will probably happen a little bit later. We are also developing the tool in a way that can be run with little to no connectivity at all, kind of how google docs does it. Users should be able to work and save offline and automatically backup on the server as soon as connection is reeastablished.

@TonyLi Yes, Articy is more of an all-in-one tool, targeted primarily to bigger businesses in our opinion. We are aiming to make something lighter and faster, with the addition of sharing/collaboration functionality and which will also be more accessible to indie/small game dev teams (like us!)