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Business description
Alchemical Works is an independent video games studio based out of Germany and formally founded in 2021. Led by founder and CEO Alain Brunotte, the team has already won a variety of accolades including the Epic MegaGrant and the winner of GDC Best In Play.
Game description
BattleJuice Alchemist is an award winning alchemy ARPG developed by Alchemical Works and featured as one of the most popular games made using Arcweave. The game follows the story of the mysterious alchemist who must roam the wilderness, learn strange magic, and craft a myriad of potions to thwart the demonic hordes of Samhain.
Released in March 2024 to 95% positive reviews, BattleJuice Alchemist is currently available on Steam for early-access. So, if you're a fan of strategy, combat, and big explosions, be sure to check it out. Complete with both isometric combat and JRPG-style one-to-one fights as well as unique item, skill and crafting systems, Battle Juice Alchemist puts a refreshing twist on the action RPG genre.
Challenges
Something that nearly all game studios struggle with is content management, especially in regards to narrative, and Alchemical Works was no exception.
"One of the main challenges while working on the narrative design of Battlejuice Alchemist was maintaining organization. Initially, the team used spreadsheets and various software before settling on Arcweave."
Narrative design encompasses so many different forms of content that it's easy to get lost in a sea of documents. Organising dialogues, questlines, characters, locations, items, and other narrative content necessitates a streamlined tool, otherwise studios will face significant obstacles in their workflow.
After experimenting with spreadsheets, Alchemical Works needed to ensure that both their organisation and collaboration worked seamlessly; therefore, they began to look for alternate software solutions to this problem.
Solutions
Once Alchemical Works discovered Arcweave, they immediately found that the software provided a great solution to these challenges.
"Arcweave helped overcome the challenges in narrative design by offering an intuitive, easy-to-learn interface, especially for visual thinkers. Its hypertext/wiki structure made it easier to stay organized, allowing us to map out complex narrative elements while keeping everything accessible."
Another big problem that Alchemical Works faced was keeping the dialogues short—they needed to deliver a compelling narrative without burdening the player with long passages of text. Using Arcweave boards helped the team to instantly identify when dialogue was too lengthy and work collaboratively to make the necessary edits.
"The visual layout made it clear when a dialogue was getting too long, helping to maintain the necessary brevity. The collaboration features were also a valuable bonus, enabling multiple team members to work together seamlessly, improving efficiency and teamwork throughout the design process."
Why choose Arcweave?
Arcweave's cloud based software allows the Alchemical Works team to work collaboratively in real time using a centralised workspace. Dialogue writing is a complex process involving game designers, writers, audio engineers, and programmers, but Arcweave empowers the wide skillset of the Alchemical Works team through a variety of features, including:
- 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 Alchemical Works flexibility unlike any other platform.
Workflow
"Arcweave is our trusty companion in this storytelling adventure. It's the digital canvas where our narrative takes shape."
After Alchemical Works adopted Arcweave into their pipeline, it quickly become an essential and highly effective tool for developing, designing, and managing narrative content.
In order to better understand how Arcweave fits into the workflow of Alchemical Works, let's examine how their team approaches narrative and dialogue writing as a whole.
1) Brainstorming
To begin the process of crafting narrative, the whole team comes together to brainstorm the questlines for each story location. Using a rough roadmap as a foundation, the team can collectively brainstorm story for each location in order to add further depth and detail to the storytelling.
2) Visualising story
Through Arcweave's node-based design, the story of BattleJuice Alchemist can be visualised like a hypertext or interactive wiki. This allows the narrative to be mapped out using a combination of elements and jumpers, with mentions granting quick navigation to key topics and terms.
In this way, the full story can be outlined using just one screen—easy to navigate, share, and manage.
3) Writing dialogue
The dialogues themselves are written by Alain Brunotte and also use Arcweave. Dialogues are location specific, so Arcweave allows them to be managed and organised in relation to their in-game context.
The visual nodes are colour-coordinated in order to represent their different contexts and in-game uses: blue elements represent individual NPCs, grey elements are their connecting dialogue, yellow elements are their corresponding quests, and orange elements are other events.
4) In-game dialogue
Once the dialogues have been finalized in Arcweave, they are implemented into the game itself. Instead of opting for back-and-forth conversational dialogue, BattleJuice Alchemist uses a NPC-focused dialogue system reminiscent of Morrowind.
This approach to dialogue writing reduces text length and offers a unique way for both Juice's personality and New England's lore to be explored.
About Arcweave
Arcweave is a versatile and easy-to-use collaborative platform for writing and designing interactive experiences, dialogue, and narratives, from explosive alchemist aRPGs 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.