How Arcweave empowered Impossible to write 65,000+ words of dialogue

Business description

Impossible is an indie videogame development studio based out of Montreal, Canada. Founded by Creative Director Lazlo Bonin in 2016, the studio is committed to developing both bold and accessible interactive experiences. After receiving funding from the Canada Media Fund in 2020, the team grew to include a range of young and diverse artists, writers, designers, and developers.

Game description

Winner of the Indie Cup's Most Anticipated Game Award and featured as one of the most popular titles released using Arcweave in 2024, Été possesses a strong, distinctive aesthetic identity, carving out a space within the cosy indie game genre. Armed with a watercolour palette and paintbrush, Été encourages the player to explore Montreal and fill the city with vibrant colour.

The wonderful part about Été is the way in which painting becomes a tool to empower the player; the opportunity to start anew and create fresh art feels liberating, rather than overwhelming. With charming dialogue and quirky characters, Été makes the city of Montreal feel brimming with life, ready for the player to explore.

Été was released on the 23rd of June, 2024 to very positive reviews, so if you're a lover of beautiful art, compelling soundtracks, and relaxing experiences, you can check it out on Steam today.

Challenges

Being an indie studio, Impossible faced a few different challenges when approaching narrative. For one, Été was being developed in Unity, but Unity doesn't come with a branching dialogue system. So, they had to start looking at other options:

"Part of the challenge in choosing the right narrative design tool was working with some writers with little to no technical or markup experience, so solutions like Twine and Ink impeded their writing flow."

The Impossible team needed to find a tool that was friendly for writers who lacked technical programming experience and, at the same time, would be powerful enough to seamlessly integrate with their custom engine. Moreover, they needed a multifaceted tool which was collaborative and supported the communication of a large team.

"As our story underwent many iterations, we needed to be able to collaborate as a team and quickly review and discuss narrative work without being bogged down with the technicals of the engine."

Solutions

Impossible decided to settle on Arcweave for a myriad of reasons. Not only did the software solve all their aforementioned challenges, but the easy-to-learn visual interface was the ideal solution for their team, especially for their writers who lacked technical knowledge.

"We liked that Arcweave was lean and didn’t pack unnecessary bloat. It didn’t require technical markup to create most branching dialogue. It’s a tool with a clear purpose, clean design, and no fluff that would encroach over what our game engine already does."

Additionally, being web-based was a huge plus for Impossible's pipeline. Story content was instantly accessible from anywhere using a web browser, making the narrative workflow highly efficient and time-saving from early onboarding to late-stage iteration.

"It took virtually no time to onboard any team member, either on the narrative or on the technical side. After showing them Arcweave for the first time, they would instantly be able to follow along a given scene."

What ultimately settled Impossible's choice for Arcweave was its ability to export all of its data in a neatly structured JSON format, enabling them to extract and integrate their narrative content with their own in-house tech.

Why choose Arcweave?

Arcweave's cloud based software allows the Impossible 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 Impossible 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 Impossible flexibility unlike any other platform.

Workflow

After settling on Arcweave, the Impossible team found that it swiftly became an essential tool for writing dialogue and mapping out story flow.

"Arcweave was the right pick for us because it was visual and intuitive. Using Arcweave, we could create branching dialogue, follow the flow of conversation, and even map out the story as a whole."

Let's have a look at how Impossible applied Arcweave to their narrative needs by implementing our software into their workflow.

1) Writing in Arcweave

The first stage of narrative design is writing the story in Arcweave. The Impossible team doesn't only use Arcweave for dialogue writing and implementation, they also use it to branch out the flow of larger story concepts.

Team members are invited to work on the project together through Arcweave's range of collaborative features such as comments, allowing the team to write, edit, and iterate directly in the boards.

"Being able to just open up a web browser and immediately look at story content was a big plus in our workflow. When iterating, commenting directly in the boards was much more convenient than using an external task tracking software."

2) Custom importer

After writing the dialogue in Arcweave, the project is exported into JSON data and imported into Unity using a custom importer build in C# by the Impossible team. This translates the Arcweave data into a format which integrates with the Impossible's in-house dialogue system.

Using this importer, the Impossible team could then add additional structures and features to fit their in-build dialogue system.

"Arcweave's data is very easy to work with. Their components and mentions architecture allowed us to 'hack' additional features into our format with relative ease."

3) Game dialogue

And finally, the dialogue appears within Été in all its charm and glory! Players navigate conversations through a multiple-choice dialogue tree, allowing them to choose which responses fit them the best.

With over 65,000 words of dialogue and 380 cutscenes, the city of Montreal comes to life through its diverse cast of 200 unique characters that players can meet, talk to, and develop a friendship with.

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.