Ancient Rift Chronicles - Articy Draft 3 implemented in Unreal

It has taken quite a bit of work to get this working. I know it doesn't look like much but it is the underpinning of something potentially impressive. I've managed to implement Articy Draft 3 in Unreal. Which isn't as easy as it sounds, the plugin documentation is a bit sparse and they essentially require you reverse engineer their demo to figure anything out.

This means I can now pull in characters, locations, dialogues, dialogue fragments, branch dialogue choices, flow, inventory, quests, etc. Custom scripted logic for handling things like personality, charisma, disposition, inventory, abilities, morale choices and other custom concepts should be highly configurable from now on via the project. The scene above has been tied into the Interact key, currently action mapped to the E key.

I should be able to drive all of the in-world conversation and quests directly from changes to my Articy project.

The next step is to migrate a lot of the work you see above into the main game project. Clean up the user interface a bit. Add some more dialogue. And, test a few quests with the player and some example NPCs.

This has got me to thinking about how to handle sequel progression; where the player remembers offing a main character in the first game but then that character becomes a major component in a sequel. And, how to deal with the death of characters that break certain quests rendering a variety of save games broken. I might have a potential solution.

Ghosts!

When any character dies, the player can use a spell to conjure and commune with spirits.  Then, they can complete a conversation they were in the middle of having and potentially finish an uncompleted quest. Perhaps for no reward or a reward you have to seek out in their hamper, grave or beside chest on your own.

This also means that our sequel could load the save game from a previous game, analyze it and accept all the dead characters as part of its initialization. Thereby keeping your memory of the world, events and their consequences intact from your past playthrough.

Stayed tuned for more details! And, remember to subscribe so we can create more content and get closer to a release. Your support helps us pay the bills, hire more staff, create more art, music, sound effects, dialogue and develop faster.