Articy: Please introduce yourself and tell us more about the team behind Lucid Dreams Studio.
Maxime: Hello, I am Maxime Grégoire, CEO and cofounder of Lucid Dreams Studio. The company was created in 2017 as the result of a long-term plan that Francis Lapierre, technology director and cofounder of the studio, and I did set up when we completed our Computer Engineering degree in 2007. Our first project, Legends of Ethernal, was created by a team of 3 people: Véronique Bellavance did the art direction and level art for the game, as Francis and I did the programming, design, story… We got some external help for character animations and music. We are now a team of 6 people.
Articy: How did Legends of Ethernal come to be? Where did the idea originate from?
Maxime The original setup for Legends of Ethernal comes from a Dungeon & Dragons campaign that was created about 20 years ago. Ever since, the world has been developed and lore has been written. Since the world was rich with details and we were looking for a universe in which to create our first title, we thought that it could give us a good starting point to use what we had. In Legends of Ethernal, we didn’t want to tell a story about good versus evil. It’s really a story about doing what you think is best for you, while definitively knowing that doing so may hurt people that are not necessarily bad.
Articy: The game has an evolving gameplay, with certain mechanics unlocking with weapons and items you find in the game. Was it hard during development to keep track of which items are supposed to unlock what?
Maxime: Yes, definitely. We didn’t have any game designer with experience within the team so handling item data was something new for us. We managed to make a system with global variables, some of them being exposed in articy:draft to be able to have proper branching. A case in the game like that is when you meet Brüwigs protecting the All-Rot Potion. Depending on the serialized data, we branch proper text. Still, we are not a proper RPG where you can buy items and upgrade them, so everything was quite manageable.
Articy: There’s a constant debate on whether storytelling tools are needed in game
development, even more so when it comes to linear stories. What made you decide to use a tool such as articy:draft?
Maxime: Since narrative are part of the games we are creating, we’ve looked at available software to help us keep together text and branching choices.
I started using articy:draft early 2015 with version 2, predating the creation of the company. I was interested in many options provided by the software such as entities definition, templates design for customization of data and great visual branching presentation. I was able to create some prototypes using the tool and I was really satisfied, so upon starting working on Legends of Ethernal, I’ve convinced Francis that this was the tool we needed to handle our text. Turns out Legends of Ethernal has around 25k words, with around 145 different dialogues, some containing branching. articy:draft was essential to our writing process.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Maxime: As our game’s story is mostly linear, the Document view was really useful!
We did define our NPCs in Entities and then created documents based on different areas of the game. This was easier than using the Flow view. However, where articy:draft was the most useful for us is really in the branching pattern within the Flow view. We were able to create rich dialogues that were branching based on variables that we were setting up directly in the game. We were also creating the speaker icons within the tool. In combination with Dialogue System for Unity by Pixel Crushers which provide a great support for articy, we were able to create everything related to dialogues in articy. We even set custom UI panels displaying different fonts directly in articy!
Articy: Legends of Ethernal is your first game, will future games be placed in the world of Arkanys as well?
Maxime: Yes, but maybe not for the next project. We’ve been “living” with Wilfred almost daily for 4 years now, we need to take a small break. However, as this universe has been in development for years, we aim to create new entries in that world, whether it is as an action-adventure game or other type of game remains to be seen. We really do have a lot to tell and we will revisit characters seen in the game for sure.
Articy: What learning are you taking from Legends of Ethernal into future projects?
Maxime On the design point of view, we really learned to handle global variables with better care. We found out that defining global variables, even those not used by any dialogues, within articy:draft helps a lot as everything is centralized. Another thing that we learned is to never underestimate the time necessary to properly schematize branching dialogues and test them within the game! I can’t remember how many times my Enter Conditions in dialogues seemed perfectly designed then, after some testing, I find that a dialogue is never triggered because I did forget to add other necessary conditions.
Legends of Ethernal is available
On Steam for Nintendo Switch for PS4 For XBox
