• EG
    Epoch Games 4 years ago

    Arcweave,

    I must say I was very happen to discover this tool! You can help fill an important niche in game development: Cloud-based Branching Storyline Software. The only other I know of is Articy:Draft, which is far too expensive of a product for what it is!

    Over the course of a few weeks, I've been trying to write my starting scene. As someone who has used Chat Mapper and Twine, two offline Branching Storylind Software Tools, I must say I'm rather disappointed in a lack of features:

    1. No ability to create Conditional Statements and Variables, like in Twine. In Twine, I can, for example, say "If this boolean this true, THEN this piece of text will show." Unless you have a very simplified game, you need to add a proper scripting language of some kind.
    2. No Find and Replace, like in Chat Mapper and Twine.
    3. No official Undo and Redo. I can CTRL+Z and CTRL+Y a few times ... but then there reaches a limit pretty quickly, and seems rather buggy. The ability to look at a Undo/Redo List would be helpful.
    4. The ability to create a Link Element that just links to another Element, like in Chat Mapper. That way you can avoid having a LONG line from one side of your story to another. Or just some way to @ other Elements.
    5. No ability to simulate your Stories like in Chat Mapper and Twine.

    The lack of the ability to collaborate (multiple people able to edit a single story) honestly feels quite minor to me compared to these other missing features.

    If more features were added, maybe I'd consider paying the monthly fees for ArcWeave, but right now I'm considering just going back to Chat Mapper or Twine and find some way to remotely share those files ... which is rather unfortunate, given how great looking and easy-to-use ArcWeave is.

  • Manos Kalaitzoglou 4 years ago

    Hi, 

    Thanks for the feedback and the suggestions! Answers below for each of the points raised:

    1) Conditional Statements and Variables: This is something we definitely want to implement, however it requires the creation of a custom pseudolanguage and will take some time.

    2) No Find and Replace: This is planned for Q2/2020

    3) No official Undo and Redo: "Official" Undo/Redo exists and you should be able to take back up to 50 actions. Can you elaborate on what type of Undo/Redo list feature you are currently missing? (example would be nice)

    4) Link Element/Mention Element: Work has already begun on this feature and it will be implemented after the deployment of realtime collab. Planned for Jan 2020.

    5) Simulation mode: A large part of this has been developed but we decided to deploy (4) before implementing it in order to be able to support loops and links to other boards. Planned for Q1/2020

    Collaboration has been prioritised before all these features because we needed to rearchitect the whole application based on the new structure before adding new stuff. However since it is such a demanding feature it has taken long to develop and test. The good news is we are almost there and as soon as it is deployed we will be able to roll out features more often again :)

    Thanks for trying out Arcweave!

  • EG
    Epoch Games 4 years ago

    All of that is actually really helpful to learn, and is a more positive response then I was hoping for!

    1) Conditional Statements and Variables: This is something we definitely want to implement, however it requires the creation of a custom pseudolanguage and will take some time.

    As someone with a few months of Twine experience, I recommend incorporating HTML and Javascript if possible. Markdown and/or MediaWiki formatting would also be nice to have as well!

    3) No official Undo and Redo: "Official" Undo/Redo exists and you should be able to take back up to 50 actions. Can you elaborate on what type of Undo/Redo list feature you are currently missing? (example would be nice)

    Well, I accidentally deleted a fairly large Element, and upon trying to undo the mistake ... it never came back. There is also the issue that, because it's all in the Cloud, refreshing the page will inevitably lose all previous Undos you could make in the project.

    Would you guys consider adding an Import/Export option? I'm mainly thinking it would be helpful to be able to "snapshot" or some button to save a "temporary version" of a Project, and then if you were to mess up things too much, be able to re-import/restore the temporary versions of the Story. I especially see such a feature as necessary with collaborative projects: with Google Docs, I can always save a local copy of the file and reimport it.

    Would be even better to have a Change Log, but because ArcWeave saves on the fly, seems like it would be a mechanism that would get out-of-control real quick.

  • Manos Kalaitzoglou 4 years ago

    Thanks for the suggestions.

    1) Ideally we would like to come up with a very simple solution (something leveraging the @ mentioning perhaps?) for the creation of variables and conditions, or a system similar to what twine does. Adding css/js support seems interesting, lets see how people will use simulation mode first and we can consider adding it afterwards.

    3) Hm, that could have been a bug, please let us know if it happens again so that we can investigate it further. In terms of history we would like to implement a timeline mechanism (like the change log you suggested). It could store e.g. the last 30 days of changes allowing users to time travel back to specific points and fork to new project (or better add project branches git style). Importing/exporting is something that has been requested in the past. It comes however with substantial maintenance cost due to versioning and we have postponed it till the new structure gets finalised. If timeline proves too much of a hurdle to implement we might opt for import/export as a stepping stone first.