Hello and welcome to the articy:draft X Basics tutorial series. In this lesson we will visit the Document View and use it to write a linear cut scene for our project.
The Document View is ideal if you want to write in a linear fashion with the convenience known from typical word processors. It could be a design document describing the mechanics of your game, or a glossary to define the project’s terminology.
You can also use the Document View to write linear dialogue in a screenplay-like format. And this is exactly what I am going to show you during this lesson. We will write a linear cut scene featuring Mina Harker and Professor Van Helsing.
Creating a document
Double click the Documents icon on the Jumpstart page (1) or select Documents in the Navigator (2).
Now create a new document by using the icon in the toolbar (1) or the right-click context menu (2).
I call the document Cutscene and open it by double clicking the tile.
articy documents consists of chapters. A chapter can simply be some text, but also something more specific like a dialogue or an image. The idea behind this approach is to offer a modular system that makes it very easy to re-arrange and change parts of a document later on.
So far our document does not have any chapters at all, all we see is the title of the document (1) and the so called Creation Toolbar” (2).
The Creation Toolbar is divided into two parts: On the left side are the hierarchy selectors (1), you can use to structure your document; the rest of the toolbar shows all the chapter types that can be created at the current position (2).
The cutscene will feature a conversation between Mina and Van Helsing, therefore we will use a Dialogue for the chapter. Click Dialogue in the Creation Toolbar to add a Dialogue chapter to the document.
Now we can enter a title. After pressing “Enter” I add some synopsis text, describing the scene.
Now our conversation between Mina and Van Helsing is supposed to begin. To insert the first dialogue line within this chapter click the “Indents the new chapter by one level” (1) button in the creation toolbar and then click the Dialogue Fragment (2) button.
The cursor will be automatically set to the Speaker position (1) and after we start typing we can auto-complete the name by pressing “Enter”. This moves the cursor to the text line (2), so you can immediately continue writing.
We can add new lines by using the Creation Toolbar, but a faster way to create dialogue lines within a dialogue chapter is by using the hotkey “Control + Enter”.
This way you stay in the writing flow and can write the entire dialogue without your hands having to leave the keyboard.
We can also add stage directions or menu text by pressing “TAB” after the speaker was set for a line. Using “TAB” multiple times cycles through the available options.
Exporting or converting a document
We have arrived at the end of our little cut scene. Similar to other articy data, there are multiple ways you can continue using documents: You can export them as part of a project export using the different options available from the main menu, or you can use a Word export that behaves quite similar to the “Flow to Word” export, which was covered in detail in the exports & imports lesson. It is available in the toolbar of the Document view content area.
What if I want to have this dialogue as part of the Flow, where the rest of the story takes place? There is an easy and quick way to convert a document, or parts of it, to Flow elements.
I open a second view pane with the story structure in the Flow view. Now we can select a chapter in the document pane (1) and move our mouse cursor to the left side of the highlighted area. When the cursor changes to a hand (2), left click, hold, drag to the flow, and release.
The chapter is converted to a Dialogue node and the single dialogue lines are now Dialogue Fragments within this node.
It is important to note that document and flow are two separate copies. If you make any changes in the document they will not appear in the flow, and vice versa.
GO TO “SEARCH & CONFLICT SEARCH” LESSON
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