Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Odd Qubit working on Cowboy Life
Iga : Hey there! My name is Iga Stankiewicz, and I’m the Quest Designer and Writer working on “Cowboy Life”. Together with Przemek Stański, Odd Qubit’s Narrative Director, we’re shaping the Wild West story of our game, heavily (and gladly) relying on articy:draft with our cowboy dialogue, quests, locations, and the likes!
As Odd Qubit, we’re a team of 7 devs, both very skilled in our own domains, while also remembering the importance of versatility. We wear a lot of different hats, and with this release, it’s cowboy ones!
Articy: Cowboy Life is an open world, non-linear, sim-and-RPG hybrid taking place in the Wild West of 19th century America. What were your sources of inspiration and how did the story come to be?
Iga:We’re actively drawing inspiration from Wild West classics and other cozy games, but many of our quests are stories designed to directly highlight specific mechanics in the game – farming, building, decoration, deconstruction, examining clues, exploration…
Przemek used his filmmaking experience to come up with the main storyline’s focal points, as well as many of the main characters’ arcs. We wanted the story to be non-linear, and apart from mundane, gameplay-related narrative, have a few more lofty elements here and there. Western as a genre has its tropes, and we don’t shy from them, but we also wanted to give the whole story a modern edge.
Articy: Building relationships is a big part of the game where even side characters have their own personality, habits and problems. How did you manage to keep track of all the storylines, quests and relationships while also keeping true to each character’s personalities and stories during the conversations?
Iga: Having one main writer for this project definitely helps with not getting lost in the sauce. A main writer with lots of RAM in her head at that! But on a more serious note, Articy has been indispensable with keeping track of everything.
Each of our characters has their own entity file, containing their name, a picture, a short description on what they do, as well as some technical info we use in Unreal. There’s also a more detailed character description slot just under all these, but for spoiler hazard reasons, I kept it out of the frame. You know how it is. 😉
Additionally, our story, both from a design and technical standpoints, is separated into storylines. It really helps us organize our quests and questlines into stories.
It was also quite challenging to simultaneously tell many stories, in which the set of characters is always virtually the same. In more traditional RPG titles, you usually stumble upon a town, sink more or less deeply into the story of its inhabitants and complete a few quests, and move on. In our case it would be impossible, and managing this situation required of me, the writer, some at times pretty elaborate scripting gymnastics.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you needed to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Iga: As a studio, we settled on articy:draft long before starting the development of “Cowboy”, during the prototype stages of our sci-fi project. We needed a tool that would be able to easily manage branching narrative and offer a clear, visual representation of that for the user, and articy:draft has proven to be the perfect candidate!
What’s also proven to be invaluable about this software for a project like ours is the seamless integration with Unreal Engine. Because of it, articy:draft has never been just a planning tool for us, but a fully functioning part of our backend for anything narrative-related in “Cowboy”. We’ve got refs to all kinds of articy objects stuck to so many blueprints they sometimes look like Christmas trees.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Iga: Very positive, for the most part! articy’s biggest advantage has definitely been the fact that we did not have to come up with our own narrative tools from scratch. We’ve tailored many of them to better fit our needs, and the versatility has been great!
It allowed us to perform many super useful checks, for example seeing if the player has already been to a specific location, if an NPC should be able to talk about a specific topic already or not yet, what items or amounts of money the player could be exchanging with the NPC… So many options!
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Iga: We have a few separate articy classes: characters, locations, dialogue lines, and dialogues, and we whipped up some neat ways to validate different things using those classes. That way, the vast majority of the narrative flow is managed using articy objects and definitions. We use the flow player (actually several flow players), but in our own way, as a “viewer” of a specific node.
Moving between the nodes is carried out by Unreal Engine and our own methods, so we can validate elements through much more than just global variables. This gives us some neat possibilities, like validating a dialogue line only if the player has at least 5 bottles of strong alcohol in the inventory, for example.
We use global variables for keeping some world changes in check and allowing characters to respond to those changes. We also change some variables inside the articy Objects in runtime, which makes the imported articy database the most important persistent database in the game! Saving those variables unfortunately needs to be done in Unreal itself, but we came up with a neat way of doing that using some “technical name-to-variable” maps.
Articy: What are some of your favorite things you used articy:draft for in the project?
Iga: Definitely the things on both spectrums of complexity: super convoluted, and those so simple they look almost funny.
One example of the first kind would be the dialogue in which our player can buy themselves a horse from the local animal dealer. I had to take into account all kinds of things the player might’ve done for the community that could warrant a discount, the fact that they may not have enough money on them at the time of the conversation, as well as that they might change their mind mid-deal. Oh, and the fact that once they might’ve not bought the horse the first time around, they could come back once they, for example, saved up enough money to actually get it. Or that the player and Otto, the character they’re buying the horse from, might not even be anywhere near where the horse is kept.
Another one of those extra complex ones is a (spoiler alert!) conversation with the main character’s close friend, going over suspects in an investigation they’re working on. This one was scripted by Przemek Stański during my few days off. Gotta say, I was quite impressed with it.
And while talking to NPCs to either progress the narration or just chat about life out in the Wild West is all nice and fun, there are times when it’s best to keep quiet – in church, for example. What then? 17 near-identical dialogues, all only available in church, shooing the player away. There are really so many ways to say “Hey, not now.” and “Yeah, got it.” Pretty sure there was a little fume above my head after writing all these one after another.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Iga: Narrative-wise, especially in non-linear narratives, it’s better to make something that looks small but works beautifully, rather than have something so grand it’s basically bloated, and if it breaks, it will take hours to figure out just where it did.
Such endeavors make the project very hard to maintain and modify. Keep it simple – if you want to introduce an NPC, make the dialogue straightforward. If you feel like they should give the player a quest right away… think again. Make the quest-giving dialogue a separate entity – separate things where you can. More separation = more flexibility = less frustration and pointless labor later on!
Cowboy Life Simulator is available on: Steam
