How Arcweave has been crucial to Bad Reaction Games since the start

Business description

Bad Reaction Games is a small team of indie developers based in West Yorkshire dedicated to making innovative and unique games with a distinctly British style of humour. Initially born from a passion project with a team of just three, consisting of Harun Ali, his brother Ahseem, and close friend Faisal, the studio has expanded over the years to include a multitude of pixel artists thanks to a funding grant from UK Games Fund.

Game description

It's Grim Up North is a quaint and comedic point-and-click adventure game which follows the story of Terry, the local Yorkshire detective who learns that his favourite pub has been overtaken by shapeshifting aliens. Using his quick wit, sarcasm, and dry humour, Terry must now investigate the locals in order to discover the imposters among them. Featured by GaMaYo, GameSideStory, and Yorkshire Games Festival. 

Chapter 1 of the game has just been released for just £6.99, so grab it while it's new and jump into the land of God's Own Country. Or, if you want to learn more about It's Grim Up North, check out its page on the Arcweave showcase for more information.

Challenges

When the idea for It's Grim Up North was first forming, the Bad Reaction team spent a long time searching for tools to help with designing the game. Being a classic point-and-click adventure game, they needed something to map out puzzles and manage the lengthy scriptwriting.

Initially, the scripts and levels were simply designed and contained within a Microsoft Word document. However, this software was extremely limited and, due to the complex nature of branching dialogue and level design, immediately created a multitude of challenges.

"One of the biggest challenges we faced has been time... We had some problems during development where we had to almost scrap and restart it, so it's gone through a few iterations."

Being a small indie team, Bad Reaction Games also faced additional limitations such as time management, lack of resources, and slow workflows. They needed a tool to help them prototype, quickly iterate, collaborate remotely, and design the game's content and logic.

Solutions

After discovering Arcweave in its early infancy, Bad Reaction Games became one of our very first users. Arcweave was swiftly implemented into their workflow, establishing itself as a core part of the game's design.

"I really liked Arcweave. I liked that fact that it's really collaborative and that I can create these great flowcharts which let me visually and text-wise see how the game progresses."

Using Arcweave's real-time collaborative features, the Bad Reaction team could work together and use the project as a centralised hub to manage, organise, and design all of the game's content, including dialogue, puzzles, levels, characters, items and descriptions.

Why choose Arcweave?

Using Arcweave as a central collaborative workspace, the Bad Reaction team can easily create a singular source of truth for all of their game's content and logic, making their Arcweave project an essential point of reference for every step in their workflow process. Arcweave empowers remote teams like Bad Reaction Games through a variety of features, including:

• Instant communication through notes and comments.
• Broad content management through boards, components, and assets, all easily organised by folders. 
• User-friendly design which is easily understood by non-programmers.
• Arcscript, our powerful scripting language that enables complex logic.

Also, Arcweave's ability to export to and integrate with a wide variety of game engines offers Bad Reaction Games flexibility unlike any other platform.

Workflow

Arcweave is a crucial part of Bad Reaction Games' workflow, being the perfect space for the indie team to collaboratively plan and develop the game's content. Not only does the workflow begin with Arcweave, as the team uses the software as an alternative to designing and brainstorming on paper, but Arcweave also acts as a vital point of reference for each stage of the game's development. During our interview with Harun, he explained exactly how this workflow takes place.

1) Planning

To begin with, Harun comes up with the premise of each level and then maps out these initial level designs in Arcweave via connecting elements and jumpers. Essentially, Arcweave is used to break down large, complex levels into readable story sections. This clearly communicates and visualises Harun's intended design for how each part of the game should connect to each other.

Once the basic structure of the level is decided, the writers can write and expand the dialogue, puzzles, and various interactions. This is also where all of the game's other content is designed and organised, such as the large cast of zany characters who are stored within components. If a character is mentioned within a scene, they can be simply dropped-and-dragged into that scene element with ease.

2) Proofreading

Next, the Bad Reaction team further make use of Arcweave's capabilities as a collaborative platform by inviting the writers and editors to proofread the game's content, including scripts, dialogue, and character information.

Using Arcweave as a localised hub for the writing and narrative creates a really easy way to check for and resolve any spelling or grammar errors, as well as provide general feedback on the game's design.

3) Implement into Unity

Using a toolkit called the Adventure Creator, these levels are then implemented into Unity. Similar to Arcweave, this toolkit uses a lot of visual, node-based scripting, rather than code-based scripting, which is perfect for the Bad Reaction team.

Throughout this process, the Bad Reaction team continually refer back to their Arcweave project to check how each level and puzzle plays out, including the branching dialogue and interactions.

About Arcweave

Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives, from hilariously bizarre British point-and-click adventure games to award-winning XR theatre productions.

Our comprehensive documentation, beginner-friendly tutorials, and thriving discord server make us the perfect tool to pick up no matter your background or experience level.

So try us out for free and join our rapidly growing community of writers and developers, including people at Netflix, EA, Microsoft, Mojang, and Amazon.