At Celtx, innovation drives everything we do. Our collaborative, cloud-based approach to film & video production was an industry first, and is now trusted by millions of users and hundreds of thousands of creative teams from around the world. With the launch of Gem, we’ve taken this expertise into an exciting new medium: video games, virtual reality, and interactive media.
One of the first challenges we faced was the fact that, even though several decades have passed since the advent of modern gaming, a universal standard for conceptualizing interactive experiences simply does not exist.
Movies, for example, are based around well-entrenched industry standards that are over a century old. Games, on the other hand, are the products of a younger, inherently renegade industry. They make their own technology, develop their own style, and design their workflows to match their idiosyncrasies. This keeps them unbeholden, but it also costs them time – and money.
Gem is our solution: a comprehensive narrative design system built with versatility and adaptability in mind. We’re not here to impose standards, but rather provide the form, function, and freedom that teams who tell stories on the cutting edge need to build their creative visions.
The first step is tackling the writing problem: how do you effectively plan a story where external decisions can influence the direction of the plot? Narrative permutations, narrative edge cases, and branching storylines are extremely difficult to represent in a conventional script editor. So, we made a new one.
Gem takes the concept of a script editor into entirely new territory. Rather than working within a single document, you can easily create expansive, multi-sequence scripts with gameplay-specific script elements like interactive dialog and intuitive branching.
As you write in Gem, the Storymap feature automatically generates a scalable visualization of your narrative – in real time. Expanding in sync with your script, the Storymap provides instant navigation and high-level oversight of your narrative as a whole.
Asset management in Gem is painless. Every component of a Gem script is added to a catalog where characters, items, dialog, decision points, and more are automatically tracked and contextualized. This creates a consistently accurate, full-cycle development resource where all team members can collaborate on design directives, concept art, and production planning.
Catalog assets are assigned unique identifiers, allowing for in-depth script breakdowns, customized reports, and .JSON / .CSV export. With Gem, all narrative data can be harnessed and integrated directly into the development toolchain.
Gem represents the convergence of technology and the craft of interactive storytelling. We saw a way to finally solve many of the issues that vex game developers by providing them with a new way to build interactive stories.
-Mark Kennedy, CEO, Celtx
Interested in learning more? Visit our Gem page for further information on features, capabilities, and to register for a personalized demo.
