VERALOMNA is a small independent international game development team that has been crafting innovative narrative experiences since 2021. Entirely self-funded, the studio focuses on creating deep, psychologically-driven RPGs that explore the intersection of human psychology and artificial intelligence. Their debut title, Locus Equation, represents years of dedicated development in collaboration with cognitive scientists to create what they describe as "a safe experimental ground" for players to explore new personas and decision-making processes.
Locus Equation is an ambitious dialogue-driven RPG that places players in the role of an anthropod, a synthetic organism created by artificial intelligence. Set on an uninhabited tropical planet stuck in eternal twilight, players must navigate complex moral and psychological challenges while guided by six distinct inner voices that advise, challenge, and complicate their decisions.
Inspired by classics like Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium, and True Detective, the game delves deep into human psychology, decision-making processes, and the ethics of human-AI relationships in a distant future. The narrative complexity requires managing hundreds of variables and interdependent story branches—a challenge that led VERALOMNA to seek sophisticated narrative tools.
VERALOMNA faced the following challenges in developing Locus Equation:
Narrative complexity at scale: With the player character (PC) interacting with six inner voices, multiple questlines, and countless branching paths, the team had to manage an enormous web of interconnected story elements and variables. The resulting oeuvre includes approximately 600,000 words of dialogue.
Team collaboration: As an international team, they required a tool that would allow both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, to keep its 5 members aligned across 2 time zones.
Rapid prototyping: The psychological complexity of their narrative required extensive testing and iteration to ensure the six inner voices felt authentic and distinct.
VERALOMNA chose Arcweave as their primary narrative development tool for its visual clarity, its collaboration capabilities, and its instant playtesting features. To handle the massive scope and complexity of their script, the team devised a sophisticated, homebrewed multi-project workflow that allowed them to break the story into manageable segments while maintaining seamless integration across the entire narrative.
VERALOMNA's development pipeline demonstrates how Arcweave serves as the central hub and source of truth in their complex, multi-tool workflow:
1. Pre-production planning: The team begins with Miro for pre-production and high-level story outlining, establishing the broad strokes of their narrative.
2. Detailed scripting and dialogue: Arcweave serves as the core tool for dialogue and scripting across six separate projects. At this stage, the team also handles playtesting and proofreading.
"We playtest compulsively. A quick estimation shows that Arcweave's Play Mode saved us over 120 hours per year of development, which would have otherwise been spent exporting builds and troubleshooting in Unreal Engine."
3. Project integration: The team created Sea of Wishes, their custom Unreal Engine parsing module that combines the multiple Arcweave projects, transforms data into their internal format, and generates source localization files.
4. Localization: To handle localizing all dialogues and in-game content, the team used Weblate with automatic fetching of updated localizations through Sea of Wishes.
5. Final implementation: Unreal Engine 5 Blueprints provide the final interactivity layer with highly variable dialogues and access to plot points via their custom subsystem.
The implementation of Arcweave has transformed how VERALOMNA approaches narrative development:
Enhanced prototyping capabilities: The team can now build fully functioning prototypes before writing any engine code, significantly reducing development time and iteration cycles.
"Early on, we gauged the impact of certain story elements by sharing a link and having testers run Arcweave's Play Mode while screen-sharing. The immediacy of feedback kept writers, developers, and artists on the same page."
Improved team alignment: The visual nature of Arcweave boards combined with real-time collaboration features has kept the international team synchronized despite working across different time zones.
Streamlined production: By embedding logic directly into narrative components, the team has eliminated the traditional separation between story and gameplay mechanics.
"Arcweave's embedded logic allowed us to build fully functioning prototypes before touching engine code. The ability to perform complex logical operations within the narrative itself streamlines production and helps us craft richer, more reactive storytelling."
VERALOMNA's use of Arcweave demonstrates how narrative tools can evolve beyond simple story management to become integral parts of complex game development pipelines. Their custom integration showcases Arcweave's flexibility and the potential for sophisticated technical workflows built around narrative-first development.
For Locus Equation, currently available to wishlist on Steam, this approach has enabled the creation of a truly reactive narrative where six distinct inner voices can respond dynamically to player choices across multiple interconnected storylines—a technical and creative achievement that would have been significantly more challenging without Arcweave's embedded logic capabilities.