In this interview, Elle Sillitoe, games writer & community manager at Arcweave, shares her thoughts on how Arcweave can enable interactive experiences for game developers.
Arcweave is a web-based application that enables creators to craft immersive stories & games.
Michael Sacco
Could you tell me about yourself and your role at Arcweave?
Elle Sillitoe
I’m Elle, I’m the community manager of Arcweave and that basically means I direct our entire communications approach, including managing all of our social media, as well as helping out with marketing, advertising, customer support, and PR. So, essentially, my job is to connect with our users and focus on a community first approach. We really want to foster a community of writers, developers, and designers, of both Arcweave users and non-Arcweave users - and we do this through a bunch of different ways. So, I spearheaded our ambassador program and our education plan, where we work closely with educational institutions to help support students using Arcweave.
Also, I help to manage our blog and showcase page, and I generally just get to know our users through discord and other social media. As Arcweave is still a startup, that means I get to work on a bunch of different stuff outside of my department as well. So, I also help with Q/A, I helped design our Unreal Engine demo project and I work with our software development team on narrative design and writing content in general.
Michael Sacco
Interesting. It’s cool to hear that you guys are also pretty focused on community-oriented growth. That’s kind of also like what we were talking about before how we grew as well. So, it’s pretty cool to see that.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, I think that was one of the first things that really resonated with me about Arcweave when it came was that it was so community focused, and I just really liked that approach. I think it’s really healthy.
Michael Sacco
What was that like? How was the company before you joined?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, I think before I joined the company I had that in mind, but they weren’t necessarily putting that into action, and I helped us actually shift into an actionable approach. So, for example, when I came, I overhauled our discord server to be a lot more community friendly, and made a bunch of changes like that, which helped put that vision into action.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, I remember when I signed up on the discord, there was a survey asking what sections I would want to be in, that was you?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, that was me.
Michael Sacco
Cool. So, you’ve joined Arcweave fairly recently, right?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah.
Michael Sacco
How did you get introduced to Arcweave and what most attracted you to the team?
Elle Sillitoe
So, before Arcweave, I worked as a games Writer and Narrative Designer for about four years, and I still do. Obviously, the games industry is going through a huge rough patch at the moment and that hit me hard as well. So, I was working as a freelance game writer at the time but a lot of my contracts were getting cancelled and it was hard to find work. I posted on LinkedIn a lot just in general about my thoughts about the games industry and just positive content about talking with indie developers and stuff like that. Manos, who’s the CEO of Arcweave, just came across one of my posts, and he really loved my style of writing. I had a background in narrative design and community management, and he thought that that would make me the perfect community manager for a narrative design company like Arcweave.
So, we just started talking and I joined the company soon after. I joined in November, and it’s been nearly five months, I think, and I really love Arcweave. I think my favorite part of working here is I get to connect with so many awesome studios and developers who use Arcweave, including some, like absolute industry veterans. So, there’s this guy called Andrew Crawshaw who joined the discord server, and he’s an Arcweave user and I had to stop myself from fan-girling because he’s so cool. He designed amazing games. He designed Amnesia: a Machine for Pigs, which was like one of the best horror games ever, like, it’s what got me into gaming, it’s what made me want to be a writer and it’s so cool that I get to talk to these people.
Michael Sacco
That’s really cool. I like to feel the sort of a similar feeling with some of like, tools and assets that I’m working on. Like, maybe not as much as we don’t really have any, like superstar users like that, but more from an inspiration standpoint of seeing really cool games that I would have loved to see feature art or tools or something like that.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, and I think it’s so important right now because obviously the industry is full of a lot of despair right now and I think it’s really important to find hope and inspiration where you can.
Michael Sacco
Tell me a bit more about Manos. What’s he like and kind of what motivated him to start Arcweave? What’s his background?
Elle Sillitoe
Arcweave was founded in 2018, by Manos and Panos who are brothers. I think the goal of the company that they both had, and the goal that they still really have, was to democratize game design and just lower the barriers of entry to game development and to narrative design as a whole. They were really focused on interactive experiences and they both came from a background in web development, I believe. Panos works a lot more on the like, hands-on development side of stuff like he does a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff and then Manos handles a lot of the day-to-day operations as CEO.
So, he’s normally the point of contact for people. So, I talk a lot with Manos, he’s really lovely. He’s just a really nice person which I really appreciate. I think he spends a lot of time trying to make everyone feel comfortable and I think that’s really important.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that is really nice. I mean, it is true, like it is quite hard, in my old role at American Express, I was leading product in my product management team I had a bunch of developers that I was working with, and they were based all over and so it was really hard to get to know them on a personal level. So, it’s cool that he is super focused on that as well.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, he’s really great and business developer, Mason, who’s new, he’s from the US. He’s also really into that, he asks a question of the day to everyone to get to know each other, which I don’t think I’ve actually answered today, but it’s really cool. It’s really fun, because you just get to learn all these tidbits about people that you didn’t already know before.
Michael Sacco
So, you said that Manos and Panos, their backgrounds are in web development. What made them want to get into the game tooling side?
Elle Sillitoe
So, I think they’ve always enjoyed games, but they weren’t in the game industry. I think they just wanted to make an interactive experience or something and they were looking online but couldn’t really find a software that provided the perfect solution.
So, they actually made a Reddit post that was like, hey, we have this idea for this software that will provide this kind of web-based solution for narrative design. Does this sound interesting? Like, do you think anyone would care about this. And that Reddit post actually blew up.
It did really, really well and they got a lot of support on that post and that basically, really gave them the kick to be like, we believe in this idea. Other people believe in this idea, let’s just go do it and they just did it. Like, they just started doing it.
They got funding from Epic Games, they won the Epic Games Mega Grant, which gave them some initial funding and then they also got funding from VCs and investors, and now it’s like a fully backed studio.
Michael Sacco
That’s awesome. That’s really great. I mean, it’s nice to have to take off funding like that because it lets you grow and like to bring on more members of the team like what they’re doing.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, I think what’s important is that they’ve grown very sustainably. So we’re still a small team, I think we only have seven or eight people and that’s really important.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that makes sense. So, where do you think that they see Arcweave going in the future? Is it branching out into new tools or like expanding the core offering?
Elle Sillitoe
So I think, right now we are quite game developer focused and game industry focused in general - that is a huge sector of the market that we really value. Most of our community are in games, and we really value that, but down the line, we’re also interested in kind of expanding that vision to encapsulate other types of interactive experiences and we already see our software being used for these kinds of really cool and unique purposes.
So, like we have escape room companies using us, interactive art exhibits, gamified recruitment services, extended reality theater, like there’s all these really interesting industries that are already using Arcweave. I think in the future, that’s something that we would really love to look at and see how we can be more dynamic and how we can give more people different tools.
Michael Sacco
So today, a lot of the benefit in Arcweave comes from being able to design an experience, but then also export it. Is that right?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, I think a lot of developers really love it because it’s a complete solution. So, you can do early prototyping, and iterate really, really quickly, but you can also play it in play mode which helps you see how it would actually play out and for some writers and interactive fiction writers, for example, that’s a fully-fledged game in of itself. But we also go one step further and allow JSON exporting. We also have a bunch of free plugins for Unreal, Unity, and Godot, like we have integration with basically every single major game engine. So, you can not only prototype, but you can also write your own script and then directly implement it into a game engine. And it’s really seamless, it’s really quick and easy. So, I think a lot of people really value that.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. For these other experiences, like escape rooms, or extended reality theater, do they also use those features? Do they work with more like a subset of the features or how do you see Arcweave adapting to better serve these users?
Elle Sillitoe
Yes, so one of the XR theatre productions is a fellowship called the IBPOC fellowship, and it’s run by Single Thread Theatre. They use Arcweave in combination with VR chat and Unity. So, our integration with Unity helps them out there. They also use Arcweave as an organizational tool and a tool to contain all their scripts and do prototyping and stuff. So, I think just because of how many different features Arcweave offers, like organization, scripting, planning, prototyping all these things, even if you’re not really interested in the game engine stuff, there’s a ton of other features for you to use.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s much more of a holistic full featured narrative design experience application, instead of being mostly just for exporting people’s knowledge.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, exactly and I think what was important was to strike the balance of providing enough features and a complete toolset without it being too overwhelming. I think that’s really important, and we have a really great team of UX designers and UI designers to achieve this. Manos and Panos also have a history of UX design. So, that’s really one of the things that’s really helped us keep it accessible, and not overwhelming despite having so many different features.
Michael Sacco
That makes a lot of sense. So today if you were going to describe the ideal person who would benefit most from using Arcweave, who would that be?
Elle Sillitoe
Well, I might be biased as a game writer, but I think games developers of all kinds. I think the best part about Arcweave is that it’s incredibly scalable. So, if you’re a solo indie dev or game writer then you can try out the free plan and just jump into narrative design without needing to pay anything, but also if you’re a team of games writers at a large AAA studio with a big budget, then our priced plans are perfect for developing a really huge, interwoven, interactive experience that has integration with whatever game engine you choose, and real time collaborative features which empower teams of all sizes to start creating and collaborating. We also have support for audio and art, images, and videos. So, we can incorporate whole teams of people, and that’s really great because it means that everyone can communicate in one place.
There’s one central hub for all of the components, one central hub for all of the assets and stories, and because you can just chat on there, you can comment, you can reply to people, it makes it really easy for teams of all sizes. It means that once you’ve incorporated Arcweave into your professional workflow, it can really benefit any kind of game developer, regardless of budget or team size or narrative vision.
Michael Sacco
It makes sense, that’s pretty interesting how it’s almost like a collaboration platform. It makes me think that a competitor for you could even be Notion. A place where you would maybe think about doing all of this work, but instead, you could use Arcweave for that, and just link it to your Notion pages.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, definitely, we’re always thinking about what our community is using and liking the most. That’s where we look into expanding. So, we do currently have a lot of organizational features that our users really enjoy, and if down the line that’s something people want us to expand on, we definitely would be open to it. I think currently, people are mainly interested in things like localization features, scripting features, stuff like that. So, we basically just work on that, to make sure that people are getting what they want, and not what we think they want, you know.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, I know that struggle. So, do you have any examples of titles that were produced using Arcweave? I know people love hearing about cool games that maybe they’ve played that use the tools that they’re thinking about using.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, so there’s a ton of amazing titles that are produced using Arcweave. There’s Glasshouse, which is a super highly anticipated CRPG and it’s one of the top wishlisted games on Steam and it also won the Pitch Your Game 2023 competition. Glasshouse is an Arcweave ambassador, we really love the team at Glasshouse, and I’ve played the demo myself - it’s really cool. There’s another game called Folly Of The Wizards, which is an amazing 2d roguelike, and it was a finalist in the 2023 Indie X Game Awards. There’s Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch), which is a horror comedy featured by Eurogamer, Kotaku, Games Hub, and IGN, and I think it was selected for Day of the Devs 2023 Game Awards - and that’s just to name a few.
So, we have a showcase page on our website for all of the various projects and titles being made with Arcweave and which we add to all the time, but there’s some huge titles on there that have won a lot of awards and I think that’s really, really cool. I love talking with these staff and like seeing what they’re working on. There’s also Beardshaker Games, who are also developing stuff with Arcweave. There’s just so many studios that are full of really cool people.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that is really cool. I mean, it’s so nice, I like personally as well, when you see people actually being able to leverage and use the tools that you’ve created or that you’ve worked with your team to create or you know, that benefit from the community that you’ve worked on. To see those games come to fruition and get released into the wild, or win awards and things like that.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, it’s so cool. Arcweave has a lot of writers. I’m a writer, and designer of narrative, Giannis is also a writer, but we don’t have as many animators and artists, because obviously, we don’t need that. So, it’s really cool to see Arcweave being used in these games that have beautiful art and beautiful animations, because it really allows Arcweave to kind of spring to life. These games really showcase the power of Arcweave in action, and I think that’s really important to help people visualize and help people kind of imagine, “Oh, Arcweave could do that for this team. I wonder what it could do for me,” and I think that’s really great as well.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, for sure. I do think I totally see what you mean, about like it being maybe hard to conceptualize for, like, if you’re just looking at, it’s like, okay, well, that looks good, but my game is like super visual and like I have players running around and characters running around, like, how am I going to tie in, like, this narrative experience to that. So, having that like, hard proof of how people did it is really cool.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, exactly and that’s why we really enjoy working on case studies and interviews and things in order to talk more with studios. We want to know how they are using Arcweave in their workflow because their games are so incredible and their narrative is awesome.
Michael Sacco
Have you guys seen any big challenges like to get Arcweave to where it is today?
Elle Sillitoe
I think the biggest challenge is probably establishing design partnerships with the really large game studios and also understanding the pipelines of those really large studios. I think indie developers are really great because they’re really open to communication and oftentimes when we get in contact with smaller developers, they’re like, “I can’t believe Arcweave just reached out to me and I have a meeting with the CEO!” And, we’re like, of course, “We want to talk to you. We love talking with you!”
But, with AAA you sometimes just can’t find the time, or you just can’t find the contacts. So, it’s harder to establish those partnerships, and that’s a problem, because we really want to understand the needs of an AAA studio. Obviously, AAA studios often use in-house tools as well, but it really would be a dream to work with a larger studio and have Arcweave integrated into one of these bigger projects. Obviously, conventions like GDC are really great for those kinds of things because it allows us to meet with a lot of these AAA studios and really big names.
Another challenge was just creating a solution that was easy to learn, and easy to manage, but at the same time being adaptable enough to work for different projects and pipelines. As I mentioned before, we want all these features, we want this complete toolset, but we also want it to be super easy to learn for students and newbies and beginners and people who don’t know how to code, but I think we’ve cracked it. I mean, we’re working on it all the time and we’re always improving, always making sure that we’re better, but I think we have a really solid foundation for building and developing our software.
Michael Sacco
Right. What are you in terms of the education side, like what do you guys specifically do to help, with initial onboarding and education, getting people started and things like that?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, so I actually designed the education plan. We work with various educational institutions such as universities and fellowships. We have a Discord server so that students ask us any questions, no matter how simple they are, and we will always make sure that we can answer them.
Even if you’re a non-paying Arcweave user, we’ll happily answer any of your questions, but for students specifically, we also have a program where we work closely with universities to help students undergo a course in Arcweave. So, by the end, they can get a certificate in Arcweave, that they can put on their resume or their LinkedIn or anything. It’s a really in-depth program.
We have a full marking system for it, they submit coursework, they undergo an exam, and it takes up a lot of our time to do it, but I think it’s really important to give students these tools and not only give them tools but give them an actual certificate to help them prove to a future employees that they can use Arcweave. So, currently, we’re working with, I think, two universities on that, but we’re hoping to work with more. It just takes time to establish these relationships, but we’re really open to it and we really love seeing what programs and what projects these students are producing because they’re really awesome.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that is really cool. I kind of have a similar sort of, like position with our users about making sure that we’re there to help educate them. I think one thing that’s kind of challenging for sure is sort of walking the line about game development being a really big space. How early do you start in the pipeline for education and how far do you carry them? I think it’s a big challenge to walk. So, what’s your thoughts on that?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, so currently, normally, when we meet with a university, we will meet with the lecturer and the students. Normally, they’ll have a bunch of questions for us, and we’ll answer them in a one-on-one meeting, just like an hour long session to answer questions that they have and then we’ll direct them towards our resources.
So, we’ll direct them towards our documentation and the YouTube videos, and stuff like that and we’ll say, just read through those first, and then come back to us in a week and we’ll answer any more questions that you have. A lot of questions will be answered just by reading the documentation, but if they have any specific problems with their project after they’ve got familiar with the software and familiar with the documentation, then we’re always happy to jump on calls.
So, we had a meeting with the university a few weeks back, and they were asking us, like, oh, if my character has health points, and I want to decrease the health points if they get attacked, is that something I could do with Arcweave? We’re like, yeah, so we walk them through variables and how that works and that’s really great, but I do think it’s important as well to try and empower students to learn independently, so they’re not just always relying on you. So, that’s why we have resources like documentation and YouTube tutorials to allow people to work independently as well.
Michael Sacco
That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s important to help people understand what resources that you offer to help them sort of learn instead of just like every time someone has a question, just immediately answering that question, but instead pointing in the right direction. So, how do you think Arcweave users might sort of benefit from using OccaSoftware?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah. I think one of the biggest struggles that game writers face is feeling confined to text-based media. So, if you’re a game writer, or a narrative designer who wants to make a narrative game that has visual elements, but you feel really overwhelmed by game engines, then I think OccaSoftware would be really perfect in that instance, because it provides you with ready-made tools and assets that you can just immediately implement with zero hassle.
For example, I know a lot of game writers who only do interactive fiction or text based adventure games. I love interactive fiction, I think it’s an amazing type of game and I think it’s really beautiful, it can be really powerful. However, I also don’t think that writers should feel like they can only do that because they don’t know enough about programming, or they don’t know enough about game engines to do something with visual elements or to do something with more game elements.
I think we should encourage people to experiment and step out of their comfort zone and do something not necessarily just with text, you know, do something that’s maybe bigger and I feel like OccaSoftware is really great for that, because of how user friendly it is, and how it just eliminates a lot of that really complex programming and all of the problems that come with trying to figure out how to do shaders and how to do the visual elements. Like me, as a writer, I do not want to have to bother with doing shaders and stuff that sounds like way too much effort. Sounds way too complicated. I just want to write, and I feel like with OccaSoftware, it really empowers you.
I also think OccaSoftware is similar to Arcweave in that we both have really great customer support. So, you can be assured that you’re going to have help every step of the way. It’s something that we both believe in and I think that’s why we’re really compatible companies. Also, with Arcweave’s integration with Unity through our free plugin, Arcweave users can go from having an Arcweave story to a Unity game really quickly, using OccaSoftware in conjunction with Arcweave, and that’s with minimal programming knowledge. So, that’s a really huge step towards both of our goals of democratizing game design.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, I totally hear you on the challenges like, how do I get shaders and stuff like that. Even more than that, it can be hard to even sort of know where to find common resources that you might need.
We just recently added a section on our website for textures and materials.
Sure, you can Google it. You’ll probably find PolyHaven and other sites like that. Then you’re like, maybe we’ll add audio next and maybe we’ll add more models next. And you’ll need to go hunting for these things. But with OccaSoftware, you’ll basically have everything at your fingertips instead of having to go hunting every time you have a problem.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, definitely. Also, it’s better to have everything in one place. Like, sound effects are something that a lot of interactive fiction writers incorporate into their text-based media, but often it’s really hard to find one website that has everything you need. You end up going to like 50 different websites, and each website has their own type of licensing. Each website, you know, might be like, oh, I don’t want you to use me in a horror game, or I don’t want to use me in a violent game or something and it can get really confusing. So, I think OccaSoftware’s vision of becoming like a one-stop shop, I think that’s really important, and I think that’s really useful for Arcweave users.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, hopefully, like we’ll be able to enable an Arcweave user, when they’re building out their narrative experience, we’ll be able to have literally everything that they could possibly need. So, I’m definitely looking forward to supporting more Arcweave users and understanding the pain points that they have when they’re building their game, so I can make sure we solve those pain points for them.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, definitely and I think it’d be really interesting to see how it works across both OccaSoftware and Arcweave.
Michael Sacco
I know a lot of our developers would be interested to hear your take on why you think Arcweave would be a good fit for OccaSoftware users. What do you think about that?
Elle Sillitoe
So, I think Arcweave provides a web-based solution for narrative design in a way that really seamlessly integrates with Unity through our free plugin. Therefore, OccaSoftware devs can immediately integrate Arcweave into their pre-existing unity workflow with ease. It doesn’t take too much time. You don’t have to learn a whole new engine or anything. It is already integrated with Unity.
Also, I think OccaSoftware provides really great solutions for visual tools and game tools and assets, but it doesn’t necessarily provide solutions for narrative design. So, if you have OccaSoftware and Arcweave together, then they provide a complete toolset for OccaSoftware users and developers and together that’s really empowering. You have a complete toolset for an entire game, and I think that’s really awesome.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, it’s very complimentary. So, do you have any dream partnerships or collaborations or customers that you would love to see work with Arcweave or use Arcweave in the future?
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton. So, we’d love to work with Epic Games because they provided us with that MegaGrant all those years ago. We feel really close with Epic Games, and we really appreciate them; they are a part of our journey. So, we would love to be able to continue that journey with them. We’d also absolutely love to work with the studios that have produced some of the best narrative games ever, you know, like Larian Studios, Bethesda, Square Enix, BioWare. These are studios that we all just love as gamers, and we think that they really understand the importance of narrative. So, obviously, we see ourselves fitting in really well there as well, because of how much we understand the importance of narrative.
Michael Sacco
Yeah, that would be really cool. I mean, they do make incredible narrative experiences and it’d be really cool to serve them and like, see what features they need and build those features out for them. Make sure that they have everything they need at the very top end of narrative development.
Elle Sillitoe
Yeah, exactly, and also just to see Arcweave being used in that way. I think it’d be so insane. We often joke like, oh my god, imagine seeing Fortnite on the Arcweave showcase. Like how crazy that would be, because, yeah, just to see something of that scale, like the scale of a AAA studio. I think that’d be really exciting for the whole team.
Thanks to Elle Sillitoe for speaking with us and for sharing her thoughts on narrative design and interactive design in games. Make sure to visit the Arcweave website, follow Arcweave on YouTube and X, and join Arcweave’s Discord community.
