BREAKING UP: TEXT BOXES, LINE LENGTH, AND YOU

Try it. You may be surprised how well it will work out. When I started to use this format I had similar thoughts to you about that.

author=Craze

LockeZ
It looks ugly to me when you have text boxes like this, with different line lengths:

Well, there's a time to use a single line and a time to break up the text.
If you can break the line at a good breaking point (comma, period, semicolon, etc.),
and the result would have the second line be the same length or slightly longer than the previous line,
it'll look better than as one really long line. Etrian Odyssey and its sequels do this quite well.

But that's not dialogue or a short description.

You'll notice that I hardly ever hit the textbox's full limit -- although the space is there for when I need it -- for a pretty important reason: my dialogue attempts to be crisp, quick and effectual. Unless I'm being solicited for an in-depth example or story, when I'm chatting with my friends I'm not going to be going on and on about how much I love curry. I'm going to say "Guys, I really fucking love curry."

And, you know what? I don't want to read a lot of text in a game. I want to read a lot of ideas, of events, of motivations, of confessions, of substance. Being wordy because TEXT IN GAMES GETS STORY PEOPLE IN is, uh, being John Green. (Fun fact: John Green is a horrible author.)

If your writing is good, you can be concise and get your point across with more effectiveness and reflection on the player's part with less words. Words are terrible. I don't want words in games! I want characters!

That was dialogue, though! It was Craze speaking to the crowd of people in the forum.

My words are mostly explanations. I know that if I don't make it clear why the characters are doing the things they're doing, people will stop the game and be like "that doesn't make sense, what the hell" and maybe even reload from the beginning of the cut scene and try to figure out what's going on, and generally just get really mad/frustrated. This was my experience through the entirety of FF13, for example. They only took half a sentence to partially explain major decisions that caused hours of gameplay and major wars and thousands of casualties, and it left me constantly wondering why the hell I was doing what I was doing.

Like, in a game I'm working on now, I have a character who doesn't use weapons. This is weird, it would be a major plot hole if I didn't explain it. So I have to put a scene where another character tries to convince him to use a weapon and he explains why that's not possible (his right arm is crippled and his left hand is missing three fingers). That scene is at least ten text boxes, several of which are filled up with text. I don't feel like I can delete a single word of it, though.

I don't want there to be any plot holes. Maybe that's insane; I know you can't explain everything going on in the game's entire world. But at least, I don't want there to be any plot holes that have anything to do with the primary plot or the main characters.

That said, yes, I basically just need to go back through my dialogue and delete about half the text. It's a recurring problem with me. I just keep explaining things, and explaining things, and explaining things, and explaining the explanation in case it didn't seem logical, and rewording the explanation in case it wasn't clearm and reiterating the explanation in case you forgot, and basically sounding exactly like this post right here, all the time.

When I get home maybe I will post an actual cut scene from my game and you can show me WHAT WOULD CRAZE DO TO THESE GIANT WALLS OF TEXT BOXES

I thought this topic seemed nitpicky from the title, but then I saw some of the examples of bad text placement... holy shit. If your game is fantastic, don't lose the player's attention by making amateurish mistakes :/

If you forget about polish, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

LockeZ: You can easily convey the same sentiment with less text and more action. Like, in that scene, rather than the character explain why he doesn't use a weapon have someone else comment on it. "I guess it must be difficult to use a weapon with missing fingers, huh?" "The crippled arm doesn't help either." There you go, two message boxes. :P