What is Torpor Games and how do you work with documentation?

Torpor Games is a games company focused on creating political entertainment. We primarily do role playing games with strategy elements. Our goal is to explore all the elements of the human condition through moral, psychological content and put the players in difficult positions in society. Primarily we used to use different documentation tools, like Google drive. Over time we've built a lot and it seemed hard to navigate. We started looking for alternatives to improve our documentation processes. As our games are quite complex, having better documentation became an absolute necessity. We looked at Archbee and we had a trial run. We really like the structure. It also improved our note taking, helped us propose better design ideas and created one main source of information where we could always refer to.

We went from very random, clustered information that was spread across multiple different file types to more organized folders, structures, forms. We also simplified the information. Instead of having a lot of information, we ended up condensing it.

Archbee has been a big part of professionalising our documentation process and making sure that all the bits and that were scattered became united under one cohesive place.

We looked at other solutions but we thought that Archbee was coming at it from a different angle, still tackling some similar components, but also adding a lot on top. for example the integrations helped us put a lot of the data that we had elsewhere into Archbee. On top of that, we have a specific use case that fits very well with Archbee, which is publishing the sites. Our universe has a lot of lore and it's massive. We always wanted to have a guided wiki that we are in charge of. We noticed that our public wiki had a lot of personal commentary from our fans. We love all the details that are getting put in there, but we wanted to have the default source of truth that we put into the games visible to anyone online. This would also add to the promotion and marketing of the game. One of the reasons Archbee was well positioned for our needs was that we cold add all the lore we had and then publish this as a website. All of these parts, the private components of the documentation or the public visible page were all under one structure. This made things very easy for us because that way we could pull external data from internal. This was a big plus and it also helped us in marketing as well.  

Can you share any results?

Most of our game design processes have improved quite drastically. We used two main components and Archbee is at the center. One of the things we started to do is condensing the information and creating in a presentable format inside Archbee. We also use integrations like Miro to link to graphs. We started using more of the new features, like the real-time edits and subscribing to changes which kept poeple up to date on all the changes to the experience. Another thing that became a positive in the last year was the AI Addon, so now we can chat with all the information that exists in our documentation tool. We noticed that for onboarding, a lot of our new staff would use this feature because we have such a big amount of lore, especially if you want to have some basic context. We also unleashed it to the public-facing wiki, wich means that our audience can chat with our universe and ask basic questions. So we've seen a massive engagement on that side, where people are using this feature to ask questions and get the basic answers that are collected from the database.

Now we're looking at further improvements to get even better witho our documentation. We see improvement opportunities in the formatting, the tables, etc.. One big advantage for us in working with Archbee is that we can be in touch with the team. We often  yearly feedback sessions and a lot of the requests that we sent were actually added to Archbee over the years. The direct communication was a big plus for us.

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