Basic Arcweave tutorial | Part 2: Your first project

This tutorial walks you through creating a new Arcweave project from scratch, setting up boards, adding elements, and connecting them to build a simple interactive story.

✅ You can play the finished version of the Tutorial Project here and explore its diagrams and structure here.

Video tutorial

Watch this tutorial as a video:

⚠️ This video does not reflect the latest updates to Arcweave's UI.

Create a new project

Let's first create a new project. To do this:

1. Close any open projects. From inside your open project, click the Workspace button at the top left corner of the project environment.
2. Go to your workspace's Projects section.
3. From the projects list, click the big orange button that says + New Project, near the top right of your window.
4. From the templates list, choose Blank Project.

Your new project opens automatically. Click the default project name at the top and rename it — for example, Tutorial.

Work with boards

Every new project comes with one board called Main Board. You can create additional boards from the sidebar.

To add a new board, go to the sidebar, find the Boards section, and click Create board (the + icon in the section header).

To rename it, right-click the board and choose Rename.

Add elements

Elements are the building blocks of your story in Arcweave. They live on boards and hold the content the player encounters. There are three ways to add an element to a board:

• Double-click on an empty area of the board.
• Right-click an empty area of the board and choose Create > Element.
• Drag the element icon (Drag new element) from the bottom menu onto the board.

Delete elements

To delete an element, select it and press Delete or Backspace, or right-click and choose Delete selection.

To select multiple elements at once, switch to Select mode, then click and drag from empty board space to draw a selection rectangle. This replaces the current selection.

See Select board items for ways to add or remove individual items or groups from the selection.

Snap to grid

If you prefer your elements aligned to a grid, click the cog icon in the top menu to open Project Settings and select Snap to grid.

Write element content

To write in an element:

1. Double-click its title area (the colored top part) and type a title (for example, Wake up).
2. Press Tab to move to the content area and type some text (for example, You wake up from a nightmare, gasping for breath.)
3. Press Escape when done.

Set starting element

The starting element is the first thing the player sees when the story runs. To set it, right-click your first element and choose Play Mode > Set Play Mode start. A star icon marks the starting element.

Run the project in Play Mode

To preview your story, click the Play icon (Play Mode) in the top menu. Play Mode opens in a new browser tab and displays your starting element's content.

✅ Once Play Mode is open in its own browser tab, you don't need to click the play icon again after making changes. Simply switch back to that tab; Arcweave will have already refreshed the current element.

Connect elements

A single element with no connections is a dead end. To continue the story, create a second element (for example, titled Get up) and connect the two.

To connect elements, hover over the edge of an element until the cursor changes to a crosshair, then drag from that edge to the target element.

Now when you run the project, the first element will display a clickable link to the second.

✅ When an element is selected, you can use keyboard shortcuts to instantly create a new connected element. Press Ctrl + Alt/Option/Cmd + an arrow key to create the new element in the direction of the arrow.

Reassign and remove connections

• To reassign a connection, grab either end of it and drag it to a different element.
• To remove a connection, select it and press Delete or Backspace, or right-click and choose Delete selection.

Create choices

The real power of interactive fiction comes from giving players meaningful choices. To create a branching path, add two new elements and connect them both from the same source element.

For example, from Get up, you could connect to:

• Go to the office
• Take a shower

When the player reaches the Get up element in Play Mode, both options will appear as clickable choices. By default, the text shown for each choice is the title of the destination element.

Add labels to connections

Labels let you display different choice text to the player without changing element titles. This is useful when you want the clickable option to read differently from the element name.

To add a label, double-click on a connection. A label field appears — type your text, then press Escape or Tab to confirm.

You can also right-click a connection and choose Add label.

Once labels are set, Play Mode will display the label text instead of the element title for each choice.

✅ Labels can contain as much text as you need, including line breaks; there is no practical length restriction.

What's next

You now have a working Arcweave project with multiple elements, connections, and player choices. In the next tutorial, you'll learn how to format text in elements and connections to give your story more visual structure.