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Business description
Hellenic American University is a private, non-profit American university chartered in New Hampshire, USA. Students located in Greece access the University's degree programs through Hellenic American College in Athens. Its undergraduate and graduate programs include Applied Linguistics, Business Administration, Informatics, Psychology, et al. The Game Writing course falls under the Application and Game Development major of the IT & Engineering programs.
Course description
The Game Writing course introduces students to the craft of developing stories and scripts for games and other interactive experiences. Students get exposed to the ways storytelling manifests in award-winning examples of video games, interactive fiction (IF), and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). They are introduced to popular game writing tools (Inform, Twine, Ink, and Arcweave) and use them to design and implement their own short interactive projects.
"In our Informatics program, we constantly seek ways to reinforce knowledge by combining theory with real-world applications. The introduction of Arcweave elevated our Game Writing course to a dedicated lab, enriching our curriculum and offering our students the opportunity for valuable hands-on experience. The results are impressive."
Dr. Panayotis Kalozoumis
The course covers important writing and storytelling theory, but its focus is on offering a hands-on experience on writing interactive narrative. The course's aim is to teach the fundamentals of writing interactive narrative in a clear and simple way, so students can not only understand it in theory, but also get inspired and write their first game projects themselves.
Challenges
Previously, the Game Writing course used scripting languages and IDEs like Twine, Ink, and Inform. These languages are very powerful and the results were satisfactory, but they also were very time consuming to teach.
"In the previous run of the course, I had to devote about 30% of the semester to teaching the ropes of demanding scripting languages."
Giannis Georgiou
Instructor, Hellenic American University
Moreover, the tools proposed obstacles for the students as well, including:
- steep learning curve: students needed several weeks to become comfortable with the tool, often sacrificing the depth and complexity of their stories.
- difficult game engine integration: these systems offered no easy workflow to create a final game that would:
- showcase the students' work,
- transcend the confines of the specific interactive fiction systems (parser / choice-based, no graphics) into a simple location-based exploration system with minimal graphics and player controls and,
- offer an easy solution for testing and editing the game and its narrative independently from the game engine—in game runtime.
Solutions
The Hellenic American University decided to use Arcweave for its Game Writing course, estimating that the app would tackle all the aforementioned challenges.
"Arcweave's intuitive, visual UI freed up the time I had previously spent on onboarding the students with the scripting languages. Now, I can use that time to give back to teaching the craft itself and provide extensive feedback on the students' work."
Giannis Georgiou
Arcweave's visual interface and smooth learning curve are ideal for beginners in writing interactive fiction. It allows students to focus on their narrative projects, without the need to engage with the technical aspects of game development.
The workspace structure allows both the instructor to effectively supervise everybody's work and the classmates to collaborate and learn from studying each other's projects.
"Thanks to Arcweave's integration features (its web API and game engine plugins) it is so easy to get my students to experience the work of a game writer designing an adventure game. With a click of the Stage's 'Fetch' button, they could instantly test the results of their work."
Giannis Georgiou
Arcweave's smooth integration with game engines makes it easy for the instructor to implement a game stage where everyone's work will play out and be tested in.
Workflow
The course's main assignment is the creation of a short game of exploration, puzzles, and dialogue. Specifically, the students were asked to go through the following process:
1) Create a setting
Each student first comes up with a setting: a location where their interactive scenario will play out. A medieval dungeon, a Miami casino, and a zombie apocalypse refuge are some actual concepts students came up with.
2) Sketch a rough map
Each student draws a rough map, sketching out a minimal story world for their scenario. This must consist of a few rooms with clear names and contents (characters and items).
3) Associate the setting's rooms with the Stage
The student must then associate the scenario's rooms with those in the given game level—the Stage.
Using this numbered diagram, the student uses Arcweave's components to define their games' rooms, characters, and items.
The Stage:
- is premade by the instructor in Godot game engine. (Game development and level design are not parts of the course's requirements.)
- is conventionally designed to accommodate all the students' scenarios, for the sake of the assignment, offering a generic architecture and a minimalist style.
"The fact that Arcweave comes with its own game engine plugins took so much burden off my shoulders—as the instructor but also the developer of the course's DIY game "Stage." It was easy and fun to implement even the events that alter the game state (like changing the score or opening doors), giving the students vast creative freedom."
Giannis Georgiou
4. Write object responses and dialogue trees
The student must write the responses and dialogue trees for every interaction in their game. When the player approaches another game object (character or item) and presses SPACE, the player interacts with that, triggering the associated dialogue tree for that object.
"Arcweave has a flexible and user friendly system for writing dialogue trees using elements, arrow options, and speaker components, and everything is neatly stored in boards and folders. It is impossible for my students to get lost, no matter how long their story is—and this is my number one demand from any interactive fiction tool: easy story navigation, during the design process."
Giannis Georgiou
5) Submit the project
Finally, the student submits their project which can then be played by classmates and instructor by fetching its data into the common Stage game.
At the end of the spring semester, the Game Writing projects will be showcased in the Student Conference, where the whole faculty can indulge in playing them.
About Arcweave
Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives, from relaxing painting simulators to grandiose 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.