Value to a pure Storyteller

[Kamikaze Q]

I have a question for the community. I'm a storyteller by nature and my only interest in any form of game development is simply to tell the stories in my head. I'm curious about Articy as a medium for organizing my ideas but I'm also worried that this might be overkill. Most likely I'm going to end up using RPG maker to tell my tales so it's not like I need to be able to import what I put into Articy into my development platform. Can anyone that has used this program give me any insight via their thoughts on whether this would be a worthwhile purchase for an aspiring writer?

[Nevigo | Kai Rosenkranz]

Hi Kamikaze Q!

Happy new year! You asked the community, but since you didn't yet get a response, I'm jumping in. ;)

articy:draft is perfect for organizing your thoughts and shaping a coherent vision out of fragmented ideas. It exports to various formats, incl. XML, and Office documents. If you're running the team version (not here on Steam), you can even write your own exporters in C++ and register them with articy:draft as an API. But the price point would be ~1,500 Euros for the whole package: articy:draft for a party of 3 plus articy:access for the custom exporters to RPG maker.

Yet, you should also be able to work off the XML export in the Steam version if you write your custom importer for RPG maker or a conversion tool.

Question to the community

Has anybody ever tried to hook up articy:draft to RPG maker? What's your experience?

Best,
-Kai

[Kamikaze Q]

Thanks for the response Kai. I went ahead and purchased the Steam version of Articy:draft and the upgrade since it was on sale in Steam. I'm pretty excited about using the product.

[Archeia]

Oh sorry about that, I did use Articy:Draft as a planner for my RPG Maker game. While it's true that you can't hook it up to the program itself, the planning, multi-braching, etc. Is helpful for getting your thoughts organized before getting into the game! You can technically use the XML database to be read in RPG Maker but you need some scripting knowledge.

[athelasloraiel]

how about enabling multisuer enviroment in a simpler way for indies and steam users?

[Rabcor]

If you're planning to make games with RPG Maker this is not overkill.

If you're planning to write a book or only write the storyline for a game, this is overkill UNLESS you're working with a team that needs to use the other features of the program (which would make it's multi user version ideal)

If you're designing an RPG (no matter what game engine you use) you're going to need to actually design it if you want it to be any good (how leveling system works, monsters, races, classes, items, etc...) and Articy has tools to manage that. (Well... except for the leveling system and classes part i'd say.)

There are other programs that can get pretty much the same thing done story-wise though available much cheaper.

Although articy will get the job done and do it well, if you don't need to use more than one of it's features i would recommend using something more specialized towards your needs.

Have a look at this[www.novel-software.com]