Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Mighty Eyes working on Wanderer The Fragments of Fate
Ben : Hi, I’m Ben Markby, co-founder and game director at Mighty Eyes, a small VR/spatial studio in Auckland, New Zealand. Years ago we fell in love with VR as a storytelling medium and, perhaps ambitiously, jumped into time travel. That experiment became Wanderer, a growing franchise built around seamless era-hopping. At any moment you can leap between periods, carrying items and knowledge across timelines. By late game, dozens of eras remain open, each evolving through cause-and-effect from key story beats. It’s a delightful design knot to untangle, and Articy has been invaluable in keeping the narrative logic watertight.
Articy: Wanderer The Fragments of Fate is a narrative driven VR puzzle adventure. Outside of the reimagined story of the original Wanderer game, what were your sources of inspiration behind the extended narrative in Wanderer The Fragments of Fate?
Ben: Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate is an expanded, ground-up remake of the original Wanderer. We believed in the core idea so strongly we rebuilt it to fully realize its potential, broadening platform support and leaning harder into a story-driven adventure first, puzzle game second believing this would appeal to a broader VR audience. Three years on, we’re shipping on Steam with new and expanded levels, refined narrative arcs, and systems that encourage deeper exploration, discovery, and in-world storytelling.
Articy: Time travel is at the core of the game which also features central locations as hubs, where players select encounters and decide which objectives to pursue. This makes for a difficult combo of player agency and time travel complexity. How did you manage to keep track of all the possible timelines?
Ben: Yes this was a huge challenge. We needed to track 1000’s of flows and be able to dip in and out of them at a moment’s notice, anytime. We altered how Unreal and Articy work together, and changed up the standard workflow of Articy to make this possible. The core of this was built upon six custom node types that map directly to Unreal events via our own bindings. These nodes all had unique attributes designed in Articy that linked to our Unreal Bindings.
We then made it so that nesting an Articy node within another Articy node would trigger the nested ones to open, thus opening up new unique flows.
These custom alterations allowed us to open up and structure Articy flows in a very non-linear and flexible way – allowing us to open and close dozens / hundreds of flows at a moments notice and have the player exist in infinite flows in parallel. (See examples of levels below). The level would still have a core narrative artery, but all the additional stuff that could happen in any order could be opened when required and closed when required.
It was also pivotal (like when you are in an escape room) that you could push a button a receive a contextual hint from your companion about what to do next, for a narrative with so much agency this was tricky, so we created a custom hintnode that piggybacked of core narrative logic and could work out based on when and where you were what your most likely next objective might be.
To wrap all of this together in a top level structure that could operate and perform optimially we created a 4 layered structure consisting of Global Quests, Chapter Quests, Narrative Core and Level Cores. This helped us segment pieces of the narrative into chunks where relevant and silo era specific narrative content into levels, whilst still allowing parts of these to exist in chapter quests and global quests.
Generally speaking it was an enormous task keeping track of everything, but Articy’s solid reliability and flexibility allowed us to craft a solution that made an impossible task – possible.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you needed to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Ben: An early prototype ran on a hacked narrative tool with hard-coded logic. Sustainable? Not even close. For full production, we needed rigorous support for parallel, non-linear narrative, dialogue control, and logic orchestration. After testing various softwares we landed on Articy, we liked the way it worked and it seemed like a good middle ground for writer’s developers and designers.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Ben: Enormous, it was the single most important system outside of Unreal Engine for the development of our game. I cannot imagine untangling the narrative knots we faced without a tool like Articy.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Ben: It’s a bit of a chaotic time in game development at the moment. Be brave. Work smart. But realise that with so much uncertainty, the simplest and most effective thing to do is just create something you believe in.
There has never been a better time to jump into Wanderer, go check it out today on: Steam Playstation Store Meta Quest
