Aviquill 1.0 Is Here: Design Dialogue, Levels, and UI Without Leaving the Canvas

Aviquill just hit 1.0, and the headline feature changes what the tool is capable of end-to-end: you can now create dialogue, design level layouts, and mock up game UIs directly inside the same canvas where you already map mechanics and systems.

Until now, Aviquill solved the "explaining a system clearly" problem but a GDD full of well-connected notes still left a gap before anything became a testable prototype. This release closes that gap. A designer can now sketch a quest, write the branching dialogue for the NPC who gives it, block out the level layout where it takes place, and rough in the UI that displays it to the player, all inside one connected canvas, without switching between four different tools that don't talk to each other.

That matters because the biggest time sink in early game development usually isn't any single task, it's the friction of moving ideas between disconnected tools, re-explaining context every time you switch. With dialogue, level layout, and UI mockups now living next to your systems map, a rough prototype of an entire game loop can go from scattered notes to something a team can actually walk through and test, faster than assembling the same thing across a notebook, a spreadsheet, and a whiteboard tool.

What's Actually New in 1.0

Dialogue creation. You can now plan branching conversations, NPC interactions, and story beats visually on the canvas, rather than writing dialogue trees in a separate script document disconnected from the scene or character they belong to. Because dialogue blocks live on the same canvas as your narrative and systems maps, a conversation can visually connect to the quest it unlocks or the mechanic it explains, which keeps writers and designers working from the same spatial context instead of cross-referencing separate files.

Level layout design. Designers can now block out rooms, paths, and layouts directly inside Aviquill, moving level planning out of scattered sketches and into the same connected workspace as everything else. Early feedback from users already testing this feature describes it as noticeably faster than their previous process for laying out how spaces connect and flow before touching an engine.

Game UI mockups. You can now rough in UI screens, menus, HUDs, dialogue boxes, all as part of the same canvas, letting you visualize how a system or mechanic will actually appear to a player before committing engine time to building it. Placing a UI mockup next to the mechanic it represents makes misalignment between "what the system does" and "what the player sees" visible early, rather than discovered during production.

Why This Matters for Prototyping

The real value of these three features together is compounding, not additive. A designer working through an early prototype can lay out a level, place the quest dialogue that happens inside it, and mock up the UI that surfaces that quest to the player, then visually trace how all three connect to the underlying mechanics already mapped elsewhere on the canvas.

That's the core loop of early prototyping: mechanics, environment, narrative, and interface all need to be roughed out together and checked against each other before any of it becomes committed engine work. Doing that across four disconnected tools means re-explaining context every time you move between them, and it's exactly the kind of fragmentation indie developers and small studios have flagged as the most chaotic part of game design.

Aviquill's answer isn't a single killer feature, it's removing the seams between the planning steps that used to require jumping tools entirely, so a rough, testable version of your game loop can be assembled once, reviewed as a whole, and only then translated into actual production work in your engine of choice.

One Unreal Engine developer already using Aviquill for exactly this described mapping quests, level connections, and system interactions in one canvas before ever opening the engine, specifically to catch design problems earlier and cheaper than discovering them mid-production. That's the workflow 1.0 is built to support at scale, not replacing your engine, but making sure what you bring into it has already been stress-tested as a coherent whole.

What's next

This release builds directly on recent updates to navigation and live collaboration, meaning the new dialogue, level, and UI tools inherit the same improvements to moving around large workspaces and reviewing designs together in real time.

If your GDD has outgrown separate tools for narrative, level design, and UI planning, 1.0 is the version of Aviquill built to bring all of it back into one canvas. Try it and see how far a rough prototype gets before you ever open your engine.