Introduction

With articy:draft, you can design more than the actual story. You can also create characters, objects, items, locations and all sorts of assets and manage them within articy:draft.

To really benefit from the integrated approach, it is essential that these individual "data snippets" can be linked to each other, i.e. to express releations like:

• This dialogue or plot point takes place in this location.
• This dungeon entrance here in this location leads to this other location.
• This entity appears in these dialogues or story parts.
• This dialogue involves these entities.
• ...

This page describes the most important means of connecting articy:draft objects.

Reference strips

Reference strips are horizontal lists of references that are visualized as icons. With the reference strip you can link everything to everything. Use it as a drop target for all articy:draft objects to establish references. Double-clicking on the reference icons takes you the linked objects, which is a very slick navigation tool.

Reference strips have two different forms of appearance:

In object sheets

A reference strip 1 can be found on top of most object sheets (in this case, an Entity). Here, the reference strip holds a concept art asset 2 and three other Entities 3.

For details on object sheets see here: Flow object sheets, Entity sheets, Locations sheets and Asset sheets.

On flow objects

Flow fragments and dialogues also have embedded reference strips 4. Use the little splitter 5 to change the size of the reference strip on flow nodes. Apart from that, they work exactly as all other reference strips.

In the example above, the user has dropped a location 6 and an Entity 7 onto the reference strip.

Placing objects in locations

The location editor lets you place all articy:draft objects on the the map to determine the exact place where they take place or are located.

Simply drop entities, dialogues, flow fragments, other locations - merely everything - onto the location map to place a "link". Just as in reference strips, double-clicking on the links takes you the linked object.

Special entity references

The previos sections have shown ways to manually establish references between articy:draft objects. In addition to that, some references will be implicitly created and presented to you in the object sheets. For example, an entity presents a list of flow fragments or dialogue fragments they appear in. You can also use specialized reference strips for paticular relation types.

The following specialized reference strips can be found in the Reference tab of the Entity sheets.