a friend asked me to look over their game's script and i had more thoughts than i expected, so i wanted to share some general advice (or at least, things i prefer or tend to do when writing my own games)

disclaimer: all of this assumes you're writing spoken dialogue for characters with 3-4 lines worth of textbox to fit 'em in. idk if it applies to all types of games. i write VNs and RPGmaker games lol. use/discard as you see fit!

click highlightext text to read the footnotes, then click the footnote to scroll back to where you were.

pacing

  • try to limit each textbox to express one idea/emotion.1 one IDEA, not one sentence. but if your one idea takes 4 sentences to communicate, you should probably be thinking in smaller ideas.
  • seriously, walls of text are intimidating and can make people's eyes glaze over. so break up overly long sentences if you can! spice up those sentence lengths!!
  • playtest your game once your scene is written and see how it feels when you read it in the format players will see it in. sometimes i write something one way in the script thinking it'll be fine, only for it to actually be distracting in some way.
  • every line in your game should serve some sort of purpose. even if that purpose is just to make a lighthearted joke--like you don't need to constantly progress the plot as long as SOMETHING is being communicated, like deepening characterization or relationships or something. don't waste people's time!
  • if your scene feels like it goes on too long, surely you can find some other place for whatever you cut out. and if you can't, then it must not have been that important to the story anyway!
  • if there's too much info that NEEDS to be in that scene, and you can't cut it or move things around, you can instead make it FEEL like two scenes by either adding some player interaction in between, or having something external happen, like a change of location.2

voice + characterization

  • if all your characters talk the same, or if their lines are completely interchangable, it's much harder to distinguish them as individuals. you start to lose the facade of it being fiction, which uh... really gets in the way of people enjoying the story!
  • it helps to assign them an emotion/vibe, like "this character is caring and sweet so they would say this in a comforting way" or "this character is super blunt and would be totally rude about this." coming up with different phrasing is easier when you have a constraint like that to refer back to.
  • it can honestly be as easy as giving someone a pet word or phrase they use a lot, although it's easy to overdo something like that...3
  • establish internal rules for what your character WOULDN'T say4, or the ways they wouldn't act or react to something. don't break these rules for the sake of the plot, unless you have an emotional reason for them to act "out of character"--real people act out of character sometimes too! it's just about creating the circumstances to explain how they got there.
  • in general, the more specific you are with the emotions motivating that character, the more realistic they will feel! like, "nice girl" is easy enough to write, but "girl who tries to please everyone by always being polite no matter the circumstances, to the detriment of her own mental health" is so specific and compelling, even though functionally they are both "girl who is nice to other people."

technical/misc stuff

  • if two consecutive textboxes start with the same word, try to move things around or use a different word instead. sometimes one word is all it takes for someone to go "oh i already read this line" and miss something on accident.
  • on a similar note, if your sentence has the same word twice, see if you can break it up/rephrase (unless that repetition is part of the joke or something). it can just be awkward to read lines like that, so it's nice if you polish that stuff out.
  • seriously read your dialogue either out loud to yourself or in your head in the character's voice, and you will get a sense for what sounds awkward when read. streamers and stuff often read these games aloud to their audience, and it trips them up when things are phrased awkwardly. help them out!! (don't repeat words, i say, and proceed to use "awkward" 3 times)
  • this sorta goes back to pacing, but... game screenshots are often shared between friends online, so it's great if you can include enough context in one textbox5 to communicate the joke (or whatever it is) in that scene. usually this is pointed out in the context of viral marketing and things like that... so maybe this is a marketing tip. but it has to do with writing, so i wanted to include it.

thanks for reading!

i learned everything i know from disgaea, so please play disgaea 4 to learn more.

footnotes are examples from my own games/characters, so feel free to ignore if you haven't played them.

  1. some of my earliest games had this problem! sometimes i fit too many sentences in one line, which often led to text overflow when i got them translated later, so i ended up having to break them up anyway. i still have to break up lines for some translations, but it's not nearly as often now!
  2. i've actually done this A LOT in lonely wolf treat. since it's rpgmaker, you can't sit in one place for too long just delivering dialogue--people expect more things to be happening on screen, so i try to have characters moving around, doing something, or going somewhere.
  3. mochi uses the word "super" enough times that treat makes fun of her for it. now i'm super conscious (omg i do it too) of having other characters use that word, so i had qmin say "mega" instead to help differentiate them (these characters may never interact but it's nice that they don't talk the same since one is a rabbit and one is a demon lol)
  4. periwinkle makes a lot of innuendos, but he'll only flirt with people who seem interested. trick always smiles and interprets everything optimistically, so even when things are bad they don't get angry or break down. syrup is rude, blunt, and has very little patience, but she doesn't find any joy in being cruel to others, and genuinely apologizes when she realizes she crossed a line. keeping all that stuff in mind helps guide my writing process, and gets me to all the plot beats i'm aiming for!
  5. the lines i choose as screenshots to represent my games are based on whether they're funny/interesting, communicate the plot or at least the vibe of that game, and ideally showcase different characters with different faces/poses if possible. for extra credit, check my screenshots on itch.io and think about why i picked the ones i did :)