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3 minute read
Business description
Monster and Monster is an award-winning team based out of Leamington Spa who specialises in game development, interactive media and digital marketing. Founded in 2011, the indie team has been developing top hit games for over a decade, accruing millions of downloads across various platforms.
Game description
Star Trucker is an upcoming futuristic truck simulator set in space where the player must haul cargo, trade and upgrade their truck systems, and search for fame and fortune amongst the stars. Developed by Monster and Monster and published by Raw Fury, the game has already attracted positive reviews from various media outlets including PCGamer, GamesRadar, and Eurogamer.
While the exact release date is unannounced, Star Trucker is set to come out this year. So, if this game sounds up your intergalactic alley, be sure to check it out on Steam and add it to your wishlist to stay notified.
Challenges
In order to make the player feel like they are a part of a massive galaxy sprawling with life, radio chatter becomes a major part of the game's atmosphere and narrative, providing opportunities for side jobs and quests, and allowing the players to connect with NPCs.
However, implementing dialogue on this scale would be a huge task for an indie team, so finding a way to automate this process was essential to saving time and resources.
"Being such a small team we knew that if we wanted to get the most out of our Star Truckin’ dialogue we’d need to find a way that we could easily iterate on our script, test in engine and avoid manually copy-pasting a short novel's worth of text."
Solutions
Prior to finding Arcweave, Monster and Monster spent a long time searching for a narrative tool which would meet their needs but never managing to find the perfect solution.
"After a fair bit of searching and experimenting with tools like Twine we eventually settled on Arcweave."
After discovering Arcweave, Monster and Monster swiftly implemented it into their workflow, streamlining their production pipeline for tracking and automating thousands of lines of dialogue and voice files.
"Arcweave is super intuitive to use with a very clean layout... It allows the whole team to work on game dialogue simultaneously."
Why choose Arcweave?
Arcweave's cloud based software allows the Monster and Monster team to work collaboratively in real time using one centralised hub. Dialogue writing is a complex process involving game designers, writers, audio engineers, and programmers, but Arcweave empowers the wide skillset of the Monster and Monster team through a variety of features:
- 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 Monster and Monster flexibility unlike any other platform.
Workflow
Arcweave seamlessly integrates into Monster and Monster's large and complex workflow, responsible for the production of dialogue from the early scripting stage to the final game. Using information from Monster and Monster's recent dev blog, let's break down this workflow step by step in order to examine how Arcweave comes into play.
1) Script Specification
The first step of the dialogue workflow is creating a mini-spec and some sample dialogue for a conversation. This script specification is then passed to the game writer.
2) Arcweave polish
Nessa, Monster and Monster's writer, then adapts the dialogue and adds it to Arcweave, adjusting how the conversation flows until it's perfect. Components are used as markup to illustrate which character speaks a line or whether the line is a piece of story dialogue or a gameplay notification.
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 your truck, which other characters you’ve talked to, etc. Arcweave's global variables are mapped to game state variables at runtime.
3) Custom scripts
Next, custom scripts are used to pull the Arcweave JSON into the game engine and convert it into an XML format, including all dialogue lines in the game, component markups, and name-mangled string ids for the localisation system.
Using this custom XML content, these scripts have enough context information to complete a variety of other useful tasks such as:
1) Creating a string table that maps the string id to the audio files. The dialogue text and audio are then synchronised via a state machine.
2) Creating a conversation flow and game logic in-engine.
3) Creating a recording script to provide a familiar way for voice actors to read their lines.
4) Creating a tracking spreadsheet for the recording engineer overview the VO files.
About Arcweave
Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives, from intergalactic truck simulators to 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.