Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at FusionPlay working on Nice Day for Fishing
René: Hi! I’m René, Game Designer at FusionPlay and the creative lead for Nice Day for Fishing. We’re a small but passionate team — three full-time developers and two freelancers make up the core of the project. Despite our size, everyone wears multiple hats, which gives the game a lot of personality and creative cohesion.
Articy: Nice Day for Fishing is an RPG pixel adventure game where Baelin the humble NPC fisherman must rise-up to become an adventurer and the hero of Honeywood. Where did the idea for the story come from?
René: The initial concept — a cozy fishing game with RPG elements — was pitched by me during one of our creative meetings. It then became a small test project to check if that can be a fun game concept.
Around that time, Baelin’s Route, the short film by Viva La Dirt League, was released. We loved its mix of humor and heart, and realized that our concept could be a perfect fit for their Epic NPC Man universe. We reached out to them with a pitch, and they loved the idea — that’s how this amazing collaboration began.
Then the small test project grew bigger and bigger and ultimately became what we now know as Nice Day for Fishing.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
René: When we started working with Viva La Dirt League, it was clear we needed to capture the same engaging storytelling and comedic tone found in Baelin’s Route and their YouTube skits.
At first, we were simply looking for a tool to design and organize storylines, dialogues, and quests — planning to build our own in-Unity system later.
But once we began using articy:draft, we quickly realized it could do much more.
It streamlined both design and implementation, so we adopted it fully for creating, managing, and importing all dialogues and quest structures directly into the game.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
René: We primarily used articy:draft for managing dialogue text.
But we also built custom structures for our quest design.
Within these, we could define variables for required items, write descriptions, and link start and end dialogues directly.
Another huge help was the multi-user feature. It allowed our writer to refine and align dialogue with the story while other team members worked on different parts of the game. That meant our narrative could evolve and improve even before those sections were playable in Unity.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
René: articy:draft really helped us organize, structure, and maintain our dialogues and quests efficiently. Instead of hardcoding everything, we could simply connect quests and dialogue pieces, which saved a tremendous amount of development time.
It also made our systems much easier to maintain — a huge advantage for a small team like ours, where flexibility and iteration are key.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
René: Story-driven games can become surprisingly complex — especially when you start editing, swapping, or expanding dialogue trees mid-development. Keeping that all organized can quickly turn into a nightmare.
Using dedicated narrative tools like articy:draft isn’t just a convenience — it’s an investment in your sanity.
