Interesting Dialogue Articles on Gamasutra
Gamasutra recently published two articles that dialogue writers may find interesting:
Worldbuilding With NPC Dialogue: A Beginner’s Guide
(Natalie Mikkelson)
Highlights:
- Building the world
- Establishing the style
- Dialogue types: one-liners, informers, companion interludes, moral dilemmas, etc.
- Tips for interesting dialogue: cut the small talk, don’t keep secrets so secret, avoid repetition
- Also contains some helpful templates
5 Radical Ideas for Dialogue Systems
(Bobby Lockhart)
Highlights:
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Symmetric Dialogue. While the player considers (hovers over) possible responses, the NPC shows a reaction. You can do the same in the Dialogue System using the Hover Response Button UI on the Dialogue System Extras page.
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Trees Within Trees. Break up conversation trees into smaller pieces (e.g., words or phrases) and combine them into whole thoughts by traversing the tree. This is more just the way you design your trees, nothing technically challenging about how you’d do this in the Dialogue System.
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Magnetic Poetry. As he writes, this is prone to combinatoric explosion – that is, each “word magnet” multiplies the number of possibilities. Worth thinking about, but probably not a practical way to write dialogue.
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Free Text Parsing. Reminds me of the Dialogue System’s Wit.ai (voice recognition) integration example. You could also use the TextInput() sequencer command and scan the text for keywords.
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Timing-based Choices. Just use the Dialogue System’s response menu timer for this.