- Joined
- Apr 16, 2011
So I am designing the story for a game that has many branching paths. I am talking MANY branching paths. The player gets to choose any point in the timeline to continue their game (since their are so many paths to take I don't want them to have to start all over each time, and only experience new content). The downside is this means a lot of possibilities and variables that need to be accounted for when choosing which dialog will be given to the player, but I narrowed it down to several things: The timeline, "ripples", and emotions. The timeline is your basic web of events, one leading to another. While the ripples are an action that you made in another part of the game not directly connected to the part you are at (i.e. you let a character die in stage one he won't be there in stage 9, and making two parallel stages with the character alive and dead simply wouldn't be feasible). And lastly the emotions which are basically the way other character asses you and react to you (i.e. angry, happy, sad).
I am looking for some software to help me storyboard this beast of a pet project. It needs to be able to show me very clearly what is connected to what, who is saying it, how they are saying it, and overall just be very user friendly since I will be spending so much time in it. It needs to keep track of all the characters and their bios. Things like Age, Aliases, history, concept art, the works. Being able to set location would be a very big plus as well. So each conversation would be linked with a location.
The first thing my eye was drawn to was articy: Draft SE. It has a nice interface for the timeline, with several layers for added organization. It keeps track of the characters almost just the way I want, and is overall easy to use. Though several downsides I see is it does not support these "ripples", things can only be directly linked. So a choice made 10 events ago cannot effect events now unless you made two entirely separate event chains for each. It also does not support locations as I would like. It would be nice to be able to throw in what is going on in the background to set up the scene, as well as color text to indicate what it is (i.e. white for spoken words, red for thoughts, orange for actions).
So Articy: Draft SE is the best I have found so far, and is currently on sale. So I was wondering if anyone knew anything better for the job or if this is as good as I will get? If you have further questions let me know.
I am looking for some software to help me storyboard this beast of a pet project. It needs to be able to show me very clearly what is connected to what, who is saying it, how they are saying it, and overall just be very user friendly since I will be spending so much time in it. It needs to keep track of all the characters and their bios. Things like Age, Aliases, history, concept art, the works. Being able to set location would be a very big plus as well. So each conversation would be linked with a location.
The first thing my eye was drawn to was articy: Draft SE. It has a nice interface for the timeline, with several layers for added organization. It keeps track of the characters almost just the way I want, and is overall easy to use. Though several downsides I see is it does not support these "ripples", things can only be directly linked. So a choice made 10 events ago cannot effect events now unless you made two entirely separate event chains for each. It also does not support locations as I would like. It would be nice to be able to throw in what is going on in the background to set up the scene, as well as color text to indicate what it is (i.e. white for spoken words, red for thoughts, orange for actions).
So Articy: Draft SE is the best I have found so far, and is currently on sale. So I was wondering if anyone knew anything better for the job or if this is as good as I will get? If you have further questions let me know.
