Christoffer Bodegård, developer of the massive, nonlinear CRPG Esoteric Ebb, unpacks the eight-year process for interactive writing, managing player choices and designing a complex, dialog-based narrative spanning 50 hours of gameplay.

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Christoffer Bodegård, solo developer of the nonlinear CRPG Esoteric Ebb, shares how he managed eight years of complex interactive writing. He outlines three constraints for interactive writing: a high choice-to-text ratio, over 50% dynamic content, and open-ended design. He explains his use of the ink scripting language (by Inkle) integrated with Unity as the core tool enabling fast branching dialog. He also describes his custom Story Variable (SV) system using tag-based prefixes to track thousands of player choices without a database, and how Notepad++ kept his workflow lightweight. The post concludes with a note on bugfixing challenges and alternative narrative tools like articy:draft, Arcweave, and Yarn Spinner.

Esoteric Ebb: Tackling The Challenge of Interactive Writing