Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Artifice Studio working on Legends of the Round Table
Artifice Studio: We’re a small team passionate about mythology, History and role-playing games based in Montréal, Canada. Before LotRT, we were mostly known for Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, a game rooted in French-Canadian folklore.
Articy: Legends of the Round Table is a CRPG that tells the story of King Arthur in the classical way based on the writings, art and music of the 13th century. Were there moments where historical accuracy clashed with game design goals?
Artifice: History inspires rather than limits us. Understanding how knights fought, with lances and horses, way more than with swords on foot as we see in many games, enabled us to come up with many unique combat mechanics. Also, designing our combat system around the customs of chivalry, such as respecting the rules of honor and, more importantly, granting mercy in exchange for ransom, produced a truly unique and original gameplay loop, since killing your opponent isn’t always the best approach.
By working with an artist specializing in the traditional techniques of medieval illumination, we were also able to create a game that truly looks like no other. The same goes for music: we worked with musicians specializing in medieval music, recorded in a church with reconstituted medieval instruments. It creates an ambiance and original soundtrack unlike any other game.
Articy: Player’s choices will affect their honor as well as the future of the realm. Additionally, each Knight has evolving traits, personal desires, and social relationships that also influence the game world. How did you organize and track all these branching storylines and interactions during development? Were there any unexpected challenges or “happy accidents” that emerged from this complexity?
Artifice: The game is divided into 7 great group adventures and around 30 smaller solo quests. Players decide which knights participate in which adventure, and they have some control on their order. So, for example, one player might find an item in adventure A that can influence what happens in adventure C, while another player might have to find a different solution because they did not play the adventures in the same order. During playtests, we discovered some great combinations that we did not even think of during conception!
Articy: With over 30 hours of gameplay, how did you test the branching narrative? Any surprises or moments where players reacted in ways you didn’t expect?
Artifice: In the beginning, we used articy:draft’s own “Journey” feature which helped us fix many things, but of course, we also had to organize real playtests. Overall, things worked quite well, but we had some surprises with some of our puzzles. Giving the proper number of hints while keeping the challenges interesting was not always easy. Also, we learned that the proper choice of words can make a huge difference in the final quality of a puzzle. Especially when you have some medieval terms that some people might not always understand…
Articy: When did you realize that managing narrative complexity required a dedicated tool? What specific challenges led you to choose articy:draft?
Artifice: We started using Dialog System, a Unity plugin that is quite good in fact. However, we soon found the limits of its UI when our prototype started to grow.
This is when we found articy.
It felt so good when we finally saw a proper tool for game design!
We also appreciated the localization feature that was included in articy during the development of our game. It’s quite the lifesaver!
Articy: How did articy:draft impact your development process and did it change the way your team worked? Can you share an example where it “saved the day” or made a complex part of the game possible?
Artifice: The best part in articy is that it gives more independence to game designers and interactive scriptwriters. After a while, programmers wrote some functions and then the designers were able to control a large part of the game experience from within articy. It gave us a lot of flexibility and the possibility to experiment with different ideas without always having to rely on programmers.
Articy: Were there particular features in articy:draft that became essential to your workflow?
Artifice: The localization feature simplified a lot of things when it was introduced.
Aside from that, the ability to easily create templates with properties for different types of interaction really improved our workflow.
Finally, having most of our design documents regrouped in articy made it faster for everyone on the team to find what they were looking for. So, for us, articy is not just for branching narratives; it is our hub for game design.
Articy: Looking back, what advice would you give to a small studio embarking on a complex narrative project?
Artifice: It’s not enough to make articy’s graphs work the way you want. You also need to make sure your graphs are easy to read and modify. When you come back to your graph a year later, things that were obvious back then may no longer be. Use comments, regroup your information hierarchically, use templates, colors and icons to improve readability.
Legends of the Round Table is available on: Steam