Hello and welcome to the articy:draft X Basics tutorial series. This lesson covers entities.
What is an Entity?
Entities represent all kinds of objects in articy, for example playable characters, NPCs or enemies; items and weapons; or even information like skills and technologies.
Working with Entities
We can get to the Entities by either double-clicking the meeples icon (1) in the Jumpstart page, or by selecting Entities (2) in the Navigator if we currently are in some other area of articy:draft.
You can create user folders to organize your content. For this small project entities are sorted into characters and items, for bigger projects or depending on your requirements you could create more user folders or hierarchies, for example characters, further separated into NPCs and playable characters, etc.
The property sheet
Double click a character tile (1), use Open Properties from the toolbar (2), or use the shortcut “F8”, to open the property sheet of the selected entity.
The entity name is at the top (1). Below that is a preview image (2), which is used on the entity’s tile and for dialogue fragments in which this entity is the speaker. Then there is a reference space (3), where we can drop all kinds of objects, we directly want to reference to this entity. This could be additional images, a word file, VO samples of actors we envision for the role, basically everything we want to connect to this object and have available with a single click. Below that we find all properties of the selected object structured in three tabs (4).
First is the general tab (1). Here we have a general description field (1), you can use for any type of information you like; the technical name (3), which you can change for ease of use in a technical or engine export; the external ID (4), which is usually empty and only relevant if this object is supposed to be used in another application, for example connected to a task planner or bug tracker; and lastly the object ID (5), which is the primary ID to identify any object within articy, consisting of a 64bit integer. This ID is set by the application and cannot be changed.
The references tab is similar to the References strip above, only here the references are populated automatically. We can see if this entity is referenced anywhere in the flow or by other entities, if it is used in any location, and in which dialogues it appears as a speaker.
The template tab (1) displays the template assigned to this object (2), or lets you assign a template if none is assigned yet (3). Templates allow you to add your own project-specific properties to nearly all object types in articy:draft. For an in-depth look, please check out the Template lessons. In simplified terms we could say that templates are what let an entity become a character, or an item, or basically anything we need for our project.
In the template tab for the entity Count Dracula we can see that a template with the name “Characters” is assigned to this object. With the available buttons we can choose another template to assign, jump to the template editor and edit the assigned template, or copy the default color specified in the template onto the currently viewed object. Let’s say we specified purple as the color for the character template. However, entities that have been assigned a custom color won’t have this overwritten automatically when assigning a template. Also, changing the color in the template does not automatically update existing objects with this template assigned.
We see all properties that belong to the character template. The option to flag this character as a playable character, a field for the voice actor’s name, background, appearance, and motivation. If we switch to the stake, the properties change, as the Weapons template is assigned to this entity. These are just the properties characters and items have in this project, in your project characters most likely come with a totally different property set, but as mentioned before, more about that in the Template lessons.
Creating Entities
To create a new entity, we can use the “Create new entity” button in the toolbar. This creates a generic entity, without any template assigned.
If we know we want a new character, right -click somewhere in the content area (1) and hover over New in the context-menu (2). We can then go to entity (3) and select one of the existing entity templates (4). Now the new entity directly has the character template assigned.
Give the character a name, assign a preview image from your assets, and fill in some template data if you like – and it is ready to get into action.
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