What is Homer?
The Story Flow Editor
Homer is an innovative tool we are working on for game story writers.
As Game Producers and developers, we in Open Lab always look around to find the best solution for specific problems. One of the most relevant problems we used to have developing games is to make the narrative writing the easiest and sharable as possible.
Writing the game narrative involves creatives, writers, developers and requires a specific approach to the theme.
First, in a game the narrative is a flow; interactions with the player make the story always change.
Any player makes choices and each choice has consequences in the gameplay and in the narrative.
The narrative flow should easily pass from a specific point of the story to another because of the player choices; that means the story is subject to specific conditions on different steps:
“If something happens then…”
or “If the player has x amount of scores then…” and so on.
The narrative must also be organized in sections to follow the game flow, any dialogue should have not only the text but also a series of attributes to say who is talking, what is the mood, where they are, etc.
As anyone can imagine, having a narrative tool that lets you visually organize your dialogues and produce a descriptive file to be used inside your development environment is a huge amount of time saved and a huge of flexibility acquired.
That is why we decided to develop
Homer lets you define each dialogue of the story creating a flow based on nodes.
Nodes can be of different types to accomplish the narrative steps requirements:
- Text
- Choices
- Conditional
- Variables
- Random
- Sequence
- Note
- Jump To Node
Each node in the flow can be connected to another node; for each type, you have specific rules. For example, a Text node can have only one connection out while the Choices node has a connection for each choice; the Conditional node has a connection for each condition plus a failed connection if any of the specified conditions is satisfied.
It works outside of the box
I don’t want to list all the Homer features and facilities (they are really many!) but what is important to point out is that Homer is not only a tool to write and display game narrative flows; it has an API that let you parse and navigate the Homer flow inside your own game project (the API is almost ready for javascript and C# Unity projects) exposing all the properties you defined for each node of each flow ad following connections according with the player choices.
That makes it possible to edit, modify, create Flows outside of your game development environment and easily integrate them inside it. So Writers and Game designers don’t have to edit any code or install incompressible software to work for you.
Homer speaks all languages
Homer also offers all the needed stuff to make your project internationalized; you can add as many languages as you want and switch the flow view to that language. All nodes will display their translated text if available otherwise the main locale text with a yellow background to advise you that this text must be translated. You can also export all texts as CSV ready to be imported to translation software by translators and import back inside Homer once translated.
verify your dialogue
You can even test the flow inside Homer and check that everything is working fine!
Lets make it more comfortable
Homer lets you work to your flow not only on the Tree Flow View; it offers a Flat View that lets you focalize just on the text as a common text editor.
Other features that will make you love Homer are:
- Internationalization of the text content.
- A smart and easy to use Variable Manager to define and set variables in the flow.
- Actors Manager.
- Powerful Search and Replace engine.
- Automatic backups of the last 20 Project opens plus forced backups from inside the application.
- Import and Export of projects.
- Cloning of Flows and Nodes.
- Undos/Redos of the last 10 actions.
- Public Preview where logged users can comment on each node.
- Grouping tab for Flows.
- Grouping tabs for Variables.
- Inline autocomplete for variables.
- Variable validation.
- Text styling (B, I, U).
- Cut/Copy/Paste one or more nodes inside the Flow or cross Flow.
- Dynamic ordering of the Flows
… And many others to be discovered ).
