Flat28 is an international independent game development collective founded by talented artists with a wide range of backgrounds including film and television. Founded in 2022, Flat28 strives to deconstruct the real and fictional, aiming to create visionary games that make a statement.
Glasshouse is a feudalpunk turn-based CRPG set in a lockdown apartment block at the dawn of a world war. Focused on political intrigue, puzzle-solving, and story-rich gameplay, this game echoes the witty writing of iconic games like Disco Elysium and Fallout 2.
While the release date is yet to be announced, the free demo is readily playable right now. So, if you're interested in politics, philosophy, or you're simply a fan of unique indie games, be sure to check it out on Steam and add it to your wishlist.
During early development, dialogues in Glasshouse were implemented by programmers directly into the code. However, this process posed a multitude of challenges, including the fact that it slowed down the narrative pipeline by burdening the programming team with extra work. Also, as the designers were working on dialogue directly in text files, this led to major potential bugs and errors with NPCs.
So, the Flat28 team needed a tool that would not only allow their narrative designers to implement dialogue without relying on the programming team, but also a tool that would be quick, clean, and easy to navigate.
"Working on dialogue via text files was hell because every time a designer got their hands on it, it could potentially create a disaster with NPC interactions."
After experimenting with other narrative design tools, the Flat28 team came across Arcweave and immediately found it to be a great solution to these challenges.
"After trying Twine and later Articy Draft, we learned about Arcweave. At first glance, we were ravished by the extreme cleanliness of the UX"
After implementing Arcweave into their workflow, the team immediately saw a huge improvement in their narrative pipeline—with narrative designers being empowered to work quickly and efficiently without needing access to the game files themselves.
"Thanks to Arcweave, now our Narrative Designers can work in nodes, writing lines of dialog without going through file pages, taking advantage of a visual representation of the flowchart that helps break down the “terror of the blank page."
Arcweave's cloud based software allows the Flat28 collective to work collaboratively in real time using one centralised hub. Narrative design is a complex process involving game designers, writers, artists and programmers, but Arcweave empowers the wide skillset of the Flat28 team through a variety of features:
Also, Arcweave's ability to export to and integrate with a wide variety of game engines offers Flat28 flexibility unlike any other platform.
Arcweave seamlessly integrates into the narrative workflow of the Flat28 team, helping to organise and centralise beatcharts, quest flow, and dialog within one tool.
"Arcweave has helped us so far to create 5 hours of gameplay content and, after an initial slowdown due to the radical change in workflow, has increased the efficiency of our writing process by 60%."
As a first step, starting with the 5 narrative beats that make up an act, the Flat28 team proceeds with creating a flowchart that sets out the quest flow. Before a single line is even written, the beginning, development, and end of each act is laid out. This informs the team of what the player will do and what interactions they will have, allowing them to start writing.
After this flowchart has been created, the actual script is written. For this, Giacomo prioritizes the main dialogues to the secondary ones by drafting a script sheet on word, employing the classic movie screenplay structure method. Then, once the script is finished and the dialogues are ready, they are handed over to the other members of the Flat28 team who follow the script and connect various boards in Arcweave.
When crafting the narrative in Arcweave, the narrative designers also take advantage of Arcscript segments (prewritten by the developers) to give variations to the elements. For example, one of the dialogues might hide collectible loot, a skill check, or a minigame. Each individual element of the dialogue tab is managed by the narrative designers via node management.
The developers have also implemented a subset of Arcscript here so that characters can comment on a variety of things, such as the condition of the player's truck, which other characters they've talked to, etc. Arcweave's global variables are mapped to game state variables at runtime.
Once the text is implemented, the Flat28 team use Play Mode to previsualize character dialogue as if it were a Visual Novel. This allows them to immediately identify and correct any issues such as the pacing of a line exchange.
Play Mode also is a great way to find typos and enable quick rewrites, helping the Flat28 team understand and improve the effectiveness of their narrative beats.
"Play Mode allows you to test in an extremely flawless way, without being afraid to step on the toes of the programmers."
After the narrative has been fully perfected in Arcweave, the project is given to the programming team. Using Arcweave's web API, the programmers can seamlessly import all of the narrative content into the Unity game build.
And with this, the world of Glasshouse is brought to life in all its charm and glory! With over 5 hours of rich gameplay and narrative-heavy content so far, Glasshouse continues to evolve into a true indie gem.
Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives, from feudalpunk RPGs to interstellar truck simulators.
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 over 25,000 writers and developers, including people at Netflix, EA, Microsoft, Mojang, and Amazon.
Thank you to Giacomo for taking the time to answer our questions for this case study. To learn more about the writing process of Glasshouse, you can read his original dev blog. Or, if you're interested in Glasshouse and want to support the Flat28 team, you can do so by wishlisting Glasshouse on Steam right now.