5 réponses à ce sujet

[Nimike]

After having spent quite a few hours writing the dialog for my add-on, I thought it would be nice to put something down and share with the community. These are mere observations I've ran into during my trips down the literature-lane. Do take them with a grain of salt, but there is a truth or two behind it all.

Anyone can do it   
    It's very easy to write a dialog. Just put words after each other and presto - you've got yourself a nice conversation. Well, at least you got yourself a conversation. Whether it is nice or not, that's entirely a different matter. I'm far from an expert, but here's few pointers that might come in hand when plotting out a dialog.
   
Conveying the message
    From my experience, the player is an impatient being and has a very limited attention span. Taking too long to explain matters will cause the dreaded ESC-spam and then the story has lost its interest. To fight this, you have several weapons in your arsenal.

• Keep it interesting via intrique, comedy, gripping dialog options, etc.
• Tension between the speakers helps. Be it hate or love.
• Keep it short - every sentence should have a purpose.
• If a sentence serves no purpose, it is likely better off deleted.
• It's ok to babble on about "the winding background information", but make sure it is never mandatory to go through these dialog options.
• Don't expect the player to read or remember everything.
• Preferably feed the crucial information from at least two different sources.
• If you are feeling up to it, break the important/heavy conversation up with cutscenes.
• Use of creative camera angles to refreshen the setting. But also, don't over do it.
• And don't forget to proof-read.  

 

Length of a sentence  
        Usually one sentence at a time is the pace to go. To this end, keep their lengths manageable. Too long and you loose the momentum and too short probably means you could've combined it with another sentence.

Example dialog:
1) "Stop! You are tresspassing on holy ground! These lands are our God's meadows and therefore you must turn back immediately or we will attack you!"

That's too long, so we cut it to 3 bits:
1) "Stop! You are tresspassing on holy ground!"
2) "These lands are our God's meadows."
3) "You must turn back immediately or we will attack you!"

Better(?), but fractured. Now we merge the sentences and make them more easily digestable:
1) "Stop! You are not welcome on our God's sacred meadows!"
2) "Turn back or face the concequences!"   
This keeps both sentences to the point and separate. First explains and the second demands.

Flow of the dialog
            Keep an eye out on how everything flows. It is easy to loose track of the bigger picture and once you play the conversation in the actual game surroundings, you may notice the dialogs faults. A simple example of this is repeated words.

            [OWNER] Interesting outfit you have there.
                [PLAYER] Want to buy it?
                    [OWNER] I'm afraid to ask how much it'd cost. No thank you.
                [PLAYER] Killed the drake myself!
                    [OWNER] I'd be too afraid to even fight a drake!
                [PLAYER] It's mine, don't have any ideas!
                    [OWNER] Don't be afraid, it's not interesting enough for my collection.

            Here the [OWNER]'s reply always has the word "afraid" in it, and that's ok. The player will never see more than one of the replies. However, the [OWNER]'s first comment has "Interesting" and the reply from the last [PLAYER]'s option has the word "interesting" in it. It doesn't look bad in the mix of dialog options, but when the player plays those exact options, it doesn't look pretty and it clashes to the listener's ear.       
           
On the more techincal side

• Keep the structure of the dialog-tree consistent. Making odd-ball structures that hop around too much will come back and haunt you.
• You can do funky things with script-based conditions.
• Comments are your friends.
• Leave blank spaces before multiple dialog options where you plan on returning. This allows you to link an empty (and preferably a commented) node.

          [OWNER] What do you want?
                [PLAYER]
                    [COMMENT] Root of food
                        [PLAYER] Give me cheese.
                            [OWNER] There you go, enjoy.
                                [PLAYER]
                                  [OWNER] [LINK] Now, can I get you anything else, lad?
                        [PLAYER] Some milk, please.
                            [OWNER] That's the drink to build your bones!
                                [PLAYER]
                                    [OWNER] Can I get you anything else, lad?
                                        [PLAYER]
                                            [COMMENT] [LINK] Root of food
                        [PLAYER] Nothing.

• It might not be something to immediately think about, but if you plan on having voice actors do your dialogs, try to link the conversations wisely to keep the amount of same sentences as low as possible. See above.

That's about it for now. Food for thought, as they say.

Modifié par Nimike, 11 janvier 2010 - 02:28 .

[Ranlas]

This seems like it would make a great wiki article. *Nudge nudge*

I definitely agree that reusing the same words or phases repeatedly is something to look out for. In the BioWare blog post about writing Stolen Throne, Gaider explains that he really learned to appreciate the editors. More pertinant to this post is the copy editor: a person dedicated to spottinjg and fixing more technical issues (like grammar). The copy editor is one who finds what they call "echoes" in your text; words/phrases that get repeated too often or too close together.

So, in short, echoes can be used for dramatic effect, especially if you associate certain phrases with certian characters, but its best to keep an eye out for using them unconciously - which every writer will inevitably do at some point or other.

Modifié par Ranlas, 11 janvier 2010 - 11:49 .

[FalloutBoy]

This belongs on the wiki. It will get lost here.

[Jain-Mor]

The man above me is correct, I only found it by chance



hopefully this will bump it up for some other enthusiasts

[BloodsongVengeance]

heyas;



how DO you make a comment entry? oh, this is 8 months old? dang, jain, you're right!



question 2: how the devil do you log into the wiki these days? i could only do it from one computer before, now that one can't do it, so i'm locked out from editing :/

[Jonathan Seagull]

I can answer the first question, at least. I just figured it out recently, and it's very helpful if you have an NPC that has a lot of different conversation nodes.



To make a Comment Entry, you just create a new line, but leave it completely blank. Then, in the Scripting Comments box to the right, you enter whatever comment you want to appear.