Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Slow Bros working on Harold Halibut
Onat: Hi, my name is Onat and I’m the director and composer of Harold Halibut, and together with Ole Tillmann (Art Director), Fabian Preuschoff (Director of Photography, Set Architect) & Daniel Beckmann (3D Artist), we also created the Story. (In general all of us had to wear many hats during the production, as we are a small team.)
Articy: Harold Halibut is narrative game about friendship and life in a retro-future world on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean. How did the idea for the story emerge, what were your sources of inspiration?
Onat: We loved the idea of a society that is closed off from external influences. Being in space would have worked well for this as well, but we liked the idea of being stuck somewhere. During Space Travel, there are still places to discover etc., while the crash-landed situation under water feels much more restrained.
One important aspect for us was also how this society or certain individuals react to the “external influences” later in the game. (I don’t want to spoil too much here ;))
Articy: Harold Halibut has players interacting with a big number of unique characters. How did you manage to keep track of all the storylines while also keeping true to each character’s personalities, quirks and stories during the conversations?
Onat: There are several layers to this, and we were kind of forced to think about a good workflow once we decided that we wanted to work together with a natively English speaking author for our Dialogues.
Danny Wadeson wrote all of those, and in preparation for that, we started writing extremely detailed Character profiles, with deep backstories, lots of things you don’t even get to know in the progress of the game. Thanks to these Character details, Danny was able to integrate a lot of “character” in every dialogue.
After writing a brief “main story overview” similar to how a “treatment” works in film, we started breaking this into individual dialogues over the progress of the game and layed these out in articy.
Over time, we added more and more sidestories and additional dialogues in parallel. We had some ideas for these sidestory arks very early, like the “brothers” ark, as well as the “restaurant wars”. So these were the ones that basically ran in parallel throughout the course of the game.
The third layer were the additional character dialogues. We wanted to create a living world, so at any point in the game we wanted players to be able to talk with characters to learn more about the current situation, or about the characters themselves. So for most characters that weren’t part of a main or a sidestory, we often thought about what they could be talking about.
All these individual “ideas” and short summaries for these dialogues were layed out in articy (we wrote the summaries in the text field of the individual dialogue fragments).
These summaries together with the detailed character profiles were a great starting point for Danny to write all the individual dialogues.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Onat: Because of the story focus of our game It was clear very early in the development, that we needed something that provided a better workflow than Word or Screenplay specific software like Final Draft, as linear writing wasn’t enough to capture the “non-linear” way video game stories work.
articy:draft was the first and only result a Google search at that time provide 😀 (that was in 2012 I think…), so it was obvious that we would at least test it. It proved to be very useful, and we loved the idea of being able to use it the way WE wanted, so we sticked with it.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Onat: We probably use most of the features, but besides of the general workflow, the exporter proved to be super useful. All the dialogue data and all variables are exported from articy to Unity, and used for example to create Timeline/Dialogue Templates by script. This helped accelerate the tedious base setup process of our dialogues and also made updating individual lines etc. much easier during the development process
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Onat: I would say start thinking about the way you want to organize things very early in the development. This is very important both for general things, like folder structures, hierarchy structures in-engine, but also for the Flow of your Articy project. Working organized and clean might take a little longer in the beginning, but save so much time in the end.
Download the full articy:draft project of Harold Halibut as a demo project:
Download Project
License agreement:
The Harold Halibut articy:draft project available for download is provided for educational and inspirational purposes only. The use of this project is for non-commercial purposes only and to evaluate the applicability, usability, performance and design of articy:draft. All content within the project, including but not limited to assets, narrative elements, texts, images, and other materials, is the sole property of Slow Bros GmbH, Mathias-Brüggen-Straße 4, 50827 Köln, Germany.
Unauthorized use, reproduction, adaptation, distribution, or modification of any part of the project or its contents is strictly prohibited. By downloading the project, you agree to respect these rights and refrain from using the materials for any purpose beyond personal study and inspiration.
Harold Halibut is available on: Steam Playstation Xbox Series X|S
