If your project grows to a certain size it might get cumbersome to keep a good overview if everything happens on one Flow layer. You have to pan around a lot and zoom in and out to find specific nodes. It might even be noticeable in the performance of the application.
articy:draft provides you with an easy to use, but very effective feature to improve upon this situation: nesting.
What is nesting?
Nesting allows you to create additional Flow layers, by submerging into Flow Fragments or Dialogue nodes. You can do this via the toolbar or with the hotkey “Enter”.
Now we are on another entirely new layer of the Flow inside the parent node. In the Navigator we can see that content on this level is indented below the node we submerged into.
To emerge from this this layer to the layer above, we can click the icon in the top left corner of this Flow layer, use hotkey “Ctrl + Backspace” / “Option + Enter”, or by clicking to where we want to go in the Navigator.
You can easily see if there are additional layers, or “inner content” within a node by the icon shown in the top right corner of a node. If this icon with the two triangles is visible it means there is content inside that node.
Improving the project structure with nesting
Nesting is a great tool to structure a project from macro to micro, from a broad top level, down to single lines of dialogue. You can use as little or as much nesting as makes sense for your project. There are no hard rules and no right or wrong, it depends on your preferences and project.
If content is nested it is much easier to move it within the project. Just grab one of those nodes and move it to another position and reconnect as applicable. The inner content moves with its parent node.
Examples of nested project structures
First, we a have small, linear, narrative game, showing one week in the life of the player character. Intro and End are cutscenes, and the single days are dialogues with various other characters. If we submerge into a Day node we get to the single lines of dialogue for the specific day.
Top Flow layer with narrative structure
Submerge into node to get to inner content
Submerged to inner content with dialogue lines
In a bigger project, we could divide up further. Like in this example, where on the top level we just find a broad distinction into the story flow, side activities, and an example dialogue as a reference for new writers. Inside the story flow node, we see the visualization of the branching structure of the game story. Each node represents a scene, and we can submerge into those as well to get to the dialogue.
Top level project structure
Visualization of game story branching structure
Example of a specific game scene
Submerged to lowest level with dialogue lines
Annotations
An additional way to help structure a project can be achieved by using annotations. Overall, it can be useful to leave notes, either for yourself or especially in a multi-user environment. However, you can also format them in a way to clearly mark specific spots in the Flow, or to highlight nodes or areas to be visible even at a higher zoom level.
An annotation’s font size and color can be changed in the toolbar, as well as the background color for the node itself. You can also send annotation nodes to the background to not occlude the content node you want to highlight.