Basic Arcweave tutorial | Part 9: Jumpers

Learn how to use jumpers to connect board items that are far apart or in different boards.

Jumpers are a powerful tool that let you move from one element to another across different boards, without using arrow connections.

This tutorial shows you how to use jumpers to break a long story into manageable segments, each living on its own board.

Video tutorial

Watch this tutorial as a video:

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

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

Diagram types

Before adding jumpers, it helps to understand the two kinds of diagrams we'll work with in this tutorial.

Event-based: Used on boards like the Beginning board (the board with your story's opening events, such as the one you built in Part 2; rename it Beginning if you haven't already). The narrative starts on the left, progresses right, branches out, and reaches an ending. Each element describes an event and the story moves forward: as a rule, there are no arrows leading back to earlier elements.

Location-based: Used in the Apartment board (which we'll create right after), where the diagram represents a physical space, like an apartment. Each element describes a room or other location and the player can move back and forth between the room-elements. Because the player can move between rooms, connections generally go in both directions.

The apartment board

So let's create our location-based diagram that represents the game's world: the apartment that you explore.

1. Create a new board and name it Apartment.
2. Add one element per room: Living room, Kitchen, and Bathroom.
3. Give all room-elements the same color so they are visually grouped.
4. Assign a cover image to each element using the relevant assets from the asset panel.
5. Connect the rooms:
   1. From the Living room, draw connections to the Kitchen and to the Bathroom.
   2. Draw return connections from the Kitchen back to the Living room, and from the Bathroom back to the Living room.
6. Add labels to each connection: Go to kitchen, Go to bathroom, Back to living room, etc.
7. Set Living room as the starting element and run a quick test to confirm navigation works correctly.

⚠️ In a location-based diagram, always add return connections. Without them, the player reaches a room and gets stuck with no way to navigate back.

Connect the boards

Now connect the Beginning board to the Apartment board using a jumper.

1. Go to the Beginning board.
2. Select the element where the player arrives at the apartment (for example, Horace opens the door) and polish it: add a cover image and a few lines of content.
3. Right-click on an empty area of the board and choose Create > Jumper, or drag a new jumper from the jumper icon (Drag new jumper) in the bottom menu.
4. Assign the Living room element as the jumper's target element. You can do this in any of the following ways:
   • Use Search: look up "living room" and, from the search results, drag the element with title Living room and drop it into the empty jumper.
   • From Boards section: from the sidebar, find and expand the Apartment board. Do not click the board itself, just click the expand arrow next to it. Then, find the Living room element in the element list and drag it into the jumper.
5. Draw a connection from the apartment-arrival element to the jumper. Add a label such as Look around.
6. Set the first element of the Beginning board as the starting element (Play Mode > Set Play Mode start) and run the story to confirm the jump works end-to-end.

✅ You don't need to first create an empty jumper: drag an element directly from the sidebar or the Search field onto an empty area of the board; Arcweave automatically creates a jumper pointing to that element.

✅ Another handy way to assign a target element to a jumper is to copy the desired element (right-click and Copy, or Ctrl/Cmd + C) and then use Paste as jumper on an empty jumper or anywhere on the board.

Jump to endings

Jumpers are also useful for routing multiple story paths to a small set of shared destinations, such as all your game's endings.

Endings board

You can keep all the endings of your story in one board:

1. Create a new board and name it Endings.
2. Add an element for each ending you need, for example:
   • Failure to enter the apartment (color: red)
   • Success! (color: green)
   • Defeated by the demon (color: red), etc.

Connect to an ending

Using one of the methods described in Connect the boards, above, create a jumper to the Failure to enter the apartment element in the Endings board.

You can lead the story to this abrupt ending if the player chooses not to take a shower before knocking the apartment's door. Connect that branch of the story flow to the Failure to enter the apartment jumper and you're set.

Replace target elements

If you need to change the target element of a jumper, drag the new target element from the sidebar or search directly onto the existing jumper. The jumper updates immediately.

Add restart jumpers

To let the player restart the story from any ending:

1. Create a jumper that targets the starting element of the Beginning board.
2. Connect all ending elements to this jumper.

⚠️ When you later introduce variables, remember to add code that resets them whenever the player restarts. For now, the jump itself is enough.

What's next

You've now seen the use and benefits of jumpers. In the next tutorial, you'll add variables to your story, to give it logic and control its flow based on what has already happened.