Arcweave
Collaborative game and narrative design
We finally felt ready enough to launch on producthunt.com. We kept delaying it due to that "notreadiness" feeling (which was a mistake) but hey, at least better late than ever. Let us know your thoughts on the launch (and Arcweave of course) and please vote for us if you like the product. Cheers!
We went for a minimalist approach and leveraged a different color palette than the one we have inside the application. We also did many performance improvements and took a mobile first approach since the app can now be used from touch/mobile devices as well 📱 Let us know your thoughts!
https://arcweave.com
I will not lie, this update took us a long time to implement (biggest part of 2019) and dropped us on our knees a few times. Not once, we felt its scope was too big and too difficult to achieve with our resources. We had to take small breaks to recoup our strength and psychology and Defeat was constantly looming around the corner.
But we pressured on. We broke apart our huge task into "smaller victories" in order to manage our morale. After almost a year of hard work we could not have been prouder for what we achieved as a small bootstrapped team: Project sharing, role management, real-time collab with ux goodies (seeing each others cursor, teleporting to other user locations) to name just a few.
I could have never imagined 3 years ago, when i was jotting down the first couple of sketches for Arcweave and knowing no code at all that today we would have crafted something like this.
It will sound cheesy but drive, patience, self-management and teamwork can do wonders: If our small team has achieved this, honestly anyone can achieve anything.
Keep up doing awesome stuff, everyone ♥
After implementing Stripe early June we finally reached 10 paying customers, 7 of which subscribed with yearly subscriptions. I guess that is a good sign, people investing time ahead in our app. We never expected to reach this number of customers in such a short time with just organic reach, especially since the app still lacks a lot of features.
It feels great that some people trusted us with their hard-earned money and we will definitely do our best to keep improving and upgrading the service. Next milestone: 50 :)
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@zanzavar I find it difficult to find an example on your website that was created with your tool - sure there are videos about the process, but the end result matters as well :-)
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Good point @sloc! Ideally we should have a section with a few example project links so that users can see some end results. Noted :)
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Congrats, it makes sense, having such a product! :) good luck.
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Thanks greatly for your kind words
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That's an awesome product! I dream of developing a game one day, I'll add this to my useful links list I'm keeping for when I'll finally start one!
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Thanks! It would be great if it helps even a little with your creative journey :)
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Really cool product, congrats
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Thanks so much, glad you like it!
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Is the demo talking about Candlekeep from Baldurs gate?
Looks like a really cool tool, can see this helpful in paper DND to track progress!
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Haha, indeed, heavily inspired from Baldurs gate! Some people actually use it for their D&D campaigns, even though most projects are narrative/adventure games
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Nice! It must feel good that people are investing long term!
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Yes, it baffles me a bit though as we dont have many features yet, nor a steady release cycle...
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Congratulations! I'm jealous.
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Thank you! Well its still a long way from becoming profitable so no reason to be jealous!
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Congrats! That's a great milestone!
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Thanks! Indeed it is, at least some people payed for it so we must be doing something well :)
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Arcweave reached 1000 subscribed users after 11 months. We did not do any marketing and all users so far arrived via organic search, forum posts and word of mouth. Thanks to everyone that has subscribed so far and trusts our efforts to create the best online game design tool :)
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Sounds like an indie hackers' dream to not have had to do any marketing to gain that kind of traction. Well done!
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Thanks! Actually our initial reddit post helped a lot as a traction kickstarter. Since that moment we had a steady influx of 2-3 registrations per day
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Hey Manos. I just checked out your website. Looks pretty sick.
One question. Why are you limiting yourself to Game Designers?
I think Writers can also benefit from this one. I know someone who writes sci-fi for hobby and her room is filled with characters storyline.
Previously, I was dabbling with Twinery to create my own interactive chat bot / infocom based games and was looking to build something like this as CMS.
Anyways just food for thought. Congrats on hitting 1000.
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Hi Siddharth,
Thanks for your kind words. Arcweave is focused on writing interactive stories & designs so it made sense to initially focus on game designers/writers who mainly work with branched scenarios (quests, dialogues, skill trees e.t.c). I am not sure whether traditional writers would benefit a lot from this tool, but you may have a point and some will prefer the mental model of a flowchart for their scenarios and characters.
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Well, I am sure writers would love to use an easy to use / web based character/plot line but it may be needed to be customized for their needs.
Interactive Fiction gets a lot of love from HN. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19645347
One Suggestion:
If you plan to build a writer friendly tool, then ask some folks about their workflow at https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/I am sure some of them would love to give ideas about what they need and will even be the beta users early on.
Good Luck.
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Wow, these are extremely useful links @primelabs, thanks a lot! I have already posted in the /gamedev subreddit but posting also in /writer and getting some feedback there is a great idea.
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Congrats
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Thanks kindly :)
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
It is an awesome feeling to create a design tool and see people getting creative with it :)
Thanks to all our users for trusting us with your creative projects, we could not be more humbled and we promise to unwrap more awesome features in the coming months!
We posted Arcweave on reddit and the response was awesome! That was the first time we opened the gates to our public beta and got an amazing amount of feedback.
Seriously, make sure you post your product on the relevant subreddit, the community is simply awesome
After 6 months in development Arcweave beta is finally live at
It was a rough ride reaching up to this point but we learned amazing things about the gaming community as well as how many disciplines a team of three people need to know in order to launch an online product.
Feel free to test it out and let us know your thoughts and suggestions!
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