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Business description
TRAINING.GAME is a leading developer of interactive serious games for corporate learning, harnessing gameplay mechanics, storytelling, and simulations to boost employee engagement, retention, and performance.
Game description
HACKED is TRAINING.GAME’s flagship cybersecurity awareness game, winner of the international LearnX Awards 2024. It's designed to strengthen employees’ defences against phishing, social engineering, deepfakes, and AI-enabled threats through interactive storytelling.
HACKED goes beyond giving employees simple tips & tricks. The game ensures that employees also understand the bigger picture and realise what consequences their own actions can have on the entire organisation. This not only results in greater understanding, but also a greater sense of responsibility. In this interactive storytelling game are used realistic simulations, real-life examples and exercises to best prepare employees for the most important cybersecurity threats. And with the exciting storyline, impressive graphics and powerful game mechanics, HACKED gives them an unforgettable learning experience.
You can check out the trailer of HACKED here.
Challenges
TRAINING.GAME aimed to solve several key challenges in developing their interactive serious games, particularly around complex storytelling, team collaboration, and scalability. They needed to design and implement highly interactive, branching storylines, especially for projects like their cybersecurity awareness game HACKED, where the player’s choices shape both narrative and learning outcomes.
TRAINING.GAME faced several interconnected hurdles while creating engaging, story-driven serious games for corporate training:
- Complex Narrative Design: Creating branching, decision-driven stories required clear overviews. The team needed to easily map out decisions, logic, and consequences, with the ability to visualize and revise as games grew in scope.
- Collaboration Barriers: Writers, developers, and subject matter experts all contributed. Maintaining shared understanding was challenging.
- Inefficient Prototyping: Rapidly testing and iterating on interactive scenarios before investing in full development was cumbersome.
- Scaling Content: As they planned for growth, TRAINING.GAME required tools that could handle increasing complexity and manage separate language versions efficiently.
People often think storytelling is just the icing on the top of serious games, but for us, it’s much more than that, it’s essential. We work with real-life cases or examples from the news and need to turn them into engaging, memorable learning experiences. Without a strong narrative foundation and a clear structure to manage complexity, even the best training content fails to stick or make an impact.
Solutions
TRAINING.GAME implemented Arcweave as their central tool for narrative design and collaboration, transforming their workflow with several clear practices:
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Visual Mapping of Storylines: With Arcweave, the team could represent narratives as visual boards. These made complex branching paths and player decisions immediately accessible, enabling ongoing adjustment and revision.
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Role-Based Collaboration: The intuitive interface meant writers, developers, and subject matter experts could all contribute directly, regardless of technical ability. The team wrote scripts—primarily in Dutch—directly in Arcweave, laying out player paths for review.
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Alignment and Communication: Arcweave served as a common reference for all team members. This made discussing new narrative directions or reviewing learning outcomes straightforward and transparent.
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Seamless Transition to Production: After prototyping scenarios in Arcweave, the team exported the decision logic for implementation in Unity, their main game engine. This two-step flow helped maintain consistency and reduce errors as projects moved from concept to completion.
Arcweave was the right tool for us because it’s clear, collaborative, and easy for everyone to use. Its intuitive interface gives us a complete overview of our storylines and player decisions, so we can plan and adjust everything together in real-time. Most importantly, it brings writers, developers, and experts together, making our whole process simple, visual, and actually enjoyable.
TRAINING.GAME chose Arcweave because it stood out in specific criteria and outperformed alternatives in key areas:
- Usability: Arcweave’s simple, visual UI allowed all team members—even those with limited technical backgrounds—to contribute and shape the final product.
- Efficient Overview: The tool gave clear visual structure to complex stories, making it easy to both manage and present the training flow.
- Facilitated Collaboration: The real-time, multi-user environment strengthened cross-role communication, speeding up reviews and consensus-building.
- Value for money: Arcweave offered essential features at a price point and simplicity that matched TRAINING.GAME’s scaling needs and workflow.
Arcweave
Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives.
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.