[POLL] WHERE DO YOU WRITE YOUR DIALOGUE?

I've been trying to write it all outside the editor, far in advance, so that when it comes time to enter it, I can give it a nice second look for consistency. Writing it outside of the editor makes it become the first draft.

I used to scoff at the extra work associated with drafts. But in using them, Some really nice revelations can appear when going over the dialogue a second time.

For all my other projects, I wrote the dialogue on the fly. It's easier for me to make it sound more believable when I actually see the situation the characters are in, and some dialogue can be given more punch by combining it with character movements and expressions. I always knew what I wanted them to say, so the challenge was figuring out how to say it.

Now, I've taken to writing everything down in a Word document. Thanks to this post the post above mine, I've learned how to write dialogue down so it's formatted correctly. Apostrophes are still a problem, but everything else works fine.

Flavor text and NPC dialogue are still done on the fly, though.

I still haven't had a really good opportunity to write lots of dialogue for any particular project, but usually I have a good idea of the story structure, characters, scenes that need to be included, etc.

So when I think of good dialogue to include I usually just write it in the notes on my phone. I imagine that if and when I get to write complete dialogue it will be pre-planned and scripted like this for the most important scenes.

EDIT: For NPCs and shit I still create dialogue entirely on the fly. This probably speaks of a bad design habit, since it's treating NPCs like they don't mean much to the player experience.

That's odd, thus far I've made maps using graph paper. I find myself unable to make maps directly in the editor. But I don't see myself doing the same for dialogue, or ever needing to. That said, you won't know how much space the dialogue will take up in the text box, until you're in the editor. I think I'd probably take this into account when writing the dialogue. For example a single sentence has to fit in the text box, so it can't be too long. I could actually see myself re-writing sentences simply to make them look better in-game. That's an advantage to doing it directly in the editor.

By the way I had a question relating to this. How to present dialogue from characters without portraits? (in a game where only some characters have portraits)
For instance I think in FF6 everyone it's written like a script where if someone says "EDGAR: (what Edgar says)" but it looks odd when I do it in VX Ace. And it's inconsistent for only some characters to do it.

Also, should all dialogue have quotation marks?

One method I was considering is having all NPC dialogue appear at the top of the screen while all party member dialogue is at the bottom of the screen. (and maybe have game messages like treasure chests appear in the middle of the screen) This helps to convey who's saying what without necessarily having to rely on portraits and names. When text boxes switch up and down it will feel more like a back and forth conversation. If everything is on the bottom, it might not be clear if someone else is suddenly talking. But maybe I'm wrong, and it's enough to simply not show a portrait for an NPC. That way portait = you and no portrait = them, which is good enough.

I threw together my own hackjob for all text. Write text, assign a key name, and the game will only have a reference to what key it should show for dialog, item name, etc. . The game itself only has a reference to the key name and pulls the text from an external file from there. It's easier to deal with when I'm only looking at the text and not having to dig through events and whatever other shit is in the way (so I can c&p it into word and see how bad my spelling and grammar are ).

Ideally I want to be able to add tags to key:text pairs and be able to sort and search based on these tags so I could for example, find all text that takes place in a certain area or said by a certain character. It also allows being able to swap out the text files it reads for theoretical localizations in other languages.

99.9% of my dialogue is done on the fly. I guess it feels more natural when I type it directly into the editor ( though I do wish my conversations flowed a bit better, like when I RP on Skype >< ).

Always outside the editor, mostly in something like Microsoft Word, since I do make a lot of spelling mistakes from time-to-time. And since I use pictures for pretty much all my dialogue sequences (because I mostly use 2k3 and I hate the limited text options that you have with it), I pretty much have to make sure that I don’t screw anything up otherwise I gotta do it alllll over again… And it’s not like in the editor where you can just type something in there and adjust anything as you go along like in XP, VX or VX Ace – no sir! You either do it right the first time or you have to do it again.

And I used to write some of my dialogue sequences in a private notebook when I was much younger, but then I realized that it’s just way more manageable to write everything down in one place.

I generally already have an idea of what each scene is going to be (some already pre-planned and dumped into the game itself with events for the sprites and whatnot, but not with the actual dialogue and scenes). When I'm bored, I tend to just write down the dialogue in a Notepad file and put it in that way, or if I feel like actually working on the game itself, I'll do it in there instead. Sometimes it takes me days just to finish one scene though since I'm extremely touchy about how dialogue goes and how the scene in general goes. There's been times I finish scenes and completely scrap it and do it over due to it not feeling right or fitting correctly.

So, a combination of both for me. Oftentimes though I just come up with it as I go, that's how I generally do everything anyways. No pre-planned scripts or anything, just let the movie reel run from my head and go there. Yes, I come up with my dialogue and scenes by pretty much running a visual movie in my head, complete with voice acting and action scenarios. >_>;;

Though I wouldn't object planning out scenes (who goes where and the general events in that moment), I generally prefer writing dialogue straight into the editor - if you really need to make a draft for a scene, you can easily create an event on a filler map and copypaste it in when you're ready. Still, if you have strong characters, there's hardly any need for planning dialogue - what the characters will say/do feels immediately obvious to me most of the time because of how well I developed the characters! Only problem will be making the plot go as intended if your characters will attempt to derail it.