Add image and audio assets in Arcweave

Use images and audio to elevate your project, better communicate your ideas, and enhance your players’ experience.

Story elements like concept, plot, characters, and theme are the most important in any narrative—including interactive ones. Whether we are talking about a story around a campfire, an improv show, or a AAA game, a compelling story is what keeps the audience fixed in place.

A great story can be supported by a multitude of audiovisual elements, like images, video, animation, voice over, music, and sound effects.

To better communicate your prototypes and to create unforgettable audiovisual experiences, Arcweave lets you upload and use image and audio assets.

If you still need to learn the Arcweave basics, go through how to write your interactive story in Arcweave, before you continue with this article.

Arcweave’s assets

Assets are the objects in the form of which Arcweave stores files, like audio and images.

To add image or audio assets to your project, go to the Assets tab, at the top left (next to the Components tab). Click +Upload asset and select the files you want to upload from your drive.

Arcweave supports the following formats:

• images: .jpg, .png, and .gif
• audio: .wav, .mp3, and .ogg

Once uploaded, you can right click on an asset to delete, rename, or globally replace it with a new file.

Organising assets in folders

Arcweave lets you create your own structure of folders and subfolders, to keep your assets organised.

The obvious example: you can create an Audio and an Images folder, to keep the two main kinds of assets separate.

Then, under Images, you can create subfolders like Characters and Locations and, under Audio, subfolders like Sound FX, Music, and Atmos. And so on.

Using image assets

Once you’ve uploaded your image assets, you can use them as covers of either elements or components.

Setting an element’s cover

Drag an asset from the Assets tab and drop it inside an element.

Alternatively, right click the element and choose Set cover.

Then, choose from your existing assets, in the popup window.

On the board, an element's cover appears as a thumbnail inside the element, placed above the text content.

On Play Mode, it shows as a full-sized image, above the text content.

To remove the cover, right click the element and choose Remove cover.

Setting a component’s cover

After you create a component, hover over its placeholder cover image and choose Change cover. Then, choose an image from the tab named My Images, in the popup window.

If you attach a component to an element that already has a cover, Play Mode shows the component's cover as a thumbnail under the element's cover.

If you attach components to an element that does not have a cover, their covers will share the space of the element cover on Play Mode.

Image assets tutorial

To see image assets in full action, watch Episode 8 of our tutorial series:

Using audio assets

Attaching audio assets

To use audio assets, you must attach them to elements, in a similar manner as image assets: drag an audio asset from the Assets tab and drop it into an element.

This creates an audio clip instance. You can see all audio instances attached to an element at its bottom part.

Audio instance's settings

Click the attached clip instance, to open its settings. Note that these settings govern the specific instance and not the asset on a global scale.

At the Play Mode Settings part, you can set to:

• Play clip once: the clip will play once and then stop.
• Loop clip indefinitely: once finished, the clip will restart, playing in a loop.
• Stop playing all instances of clip: all instances of the clip (there may be more than one; they may be looping or not) will immediately stop playing.

You can also add a Delay, so the clip starts playing after a few milliseconds.

Audio control in Play Mode

While testing your story in Play Mode, you can adjust the playback volume. Click anywhere outside the content area, to bring forth the Play Mode menu.

If your story has audio attachments, you will see a volume slider at the top right. Use it to set your desired volume.

Audio assets tutorial

To see examples of adding and setting audio assets, watch Episode 23 of our video tutorials:

An assets demo

Finally, you can enjoy an asset-rich Arcweave project created by one of our users.

To see how assets are used in this example, explore its board structure.

Now it's your turn

Experiment by adding image and audio assets to your own project. Use images as both element and component covers. Then, add and manipulate audio clips and see how the result plays out on Play Mode.

The more you practice, the quicker you'll get to the point where using assets becomes a no-brainer.