konradharlan asked: Hey, what's your process like when writing dialog trees? I don't mean in a technical manner. I've been working on a little game on my spare time and I find it hard to collect my thoughts in a good way when writing.
I think it’s true that every writer finds their own best practices that work well for them. I think most of us have problems either with getting moving/procrastination or with editing after dumping out a huge volume of text. Over the years, I’ve been relieved to hear accomplished writers admit to a lot of procrastination and fussing in their processes (e.g. Stephen Sondheim says he likes using soft pencils so he has to sharpen them frequently).
I’m not an especially prolific writer. I usually start with a character brief that lists out a few salient facts about the character’s motives and characteristic keywords (e.g. proud, boorish, shy, etc.). For dialogue trees, I list out topics that the character will discuss. Some of these topics are of central importance to a quest, others are informational. Whenever possible, I try to think of ways to combine the informational topics with the character’s motivations so they’re speaking about something that’s central to them instead of reciting text that could be in a book.
The organizational structure is dictated by how nodes relate to quest or non-quest topics. Non-quest topics can be accessed in a variety of places and should be available quickly whenever you speak to the character. Quest topics have a more directed flow. The conflict of the quest’s current state moves inexorably toward its next state, so those branches tend to be longer and with fewer individual branches. My focus is on giving the player choices that we can deliver on in terms of consequences.
When the general topic list is created and I’ve laid out the node structure, I start writing the NPC/companion dialogue and player replies. At this stage, I try to be careful about adding new branches as that can get out of hand pretty quickly. After the dialogue and descriptive prose have been written, for voiced characters I add in pronunciation guides and try to speak through the lines to ensure there’s nothing that sounds weird (in a bad way).
