Rainbow Nightmare: Libra

I wanted to quickly add this example.

On the left, we have the original:

And then, once we add these rules:
-Read your dialogue out loud.
-3 sentences/text window minimum per character
-2 sentences maximum per window.
- Each sentence is a complete sentences contained in the same window.



You can immediately see on the right,
it’s a lot easier to read and it flows much more naturally for the player.

Again, you do not have to always follow these rules.
But when it comes to revising dialogue, this definitely helps clean it up a bit
and it makes it a lot easier to follow.

Again, I didn’t do much to this one, except place the first line in it’s own separate window.
But by doing this, you keep that 3-sentence-rhythm going we’re often familiar with seeing in TV shows, jrpgs, cartoons etc.



There’s a lot more going on when you use this 3-beat structure in dialogue:
The first line is usually a statement your character makes.
The second line is usually how the statement relates to the character.
The third line is how it relates to the overall plot.

Don’t try to think too hard about this structure; as long as it advances the plot and reveals more about your characters, it’s good dialogue. Restricting yourself to this 3-sentence structure usually helps achieve that.

Like, from this example, we can see that a scientist is eventually going to join Duram’s team, there’s foreshadowing that our heroes might get stuck on Mt.Aragote and Priss does not like patrol duty. You’ve well established what’s going to happen to your characters as the story progresses.

...I decided to post a few more suggestions because I just really like what I played from the demo – I want to make this very clear. These revisions are far from perfect but they may give you a better idea of how to clean these scenes up.



I imagined when Duram coughs here in this scene, it’s an interrupting cough, and it’s interrupting what Lutwig is saying. I thought, maybe revise the text a bit to reflect that. But other than that, this is fine, everything’s readable and in complete sentences.


The CoffinGrendel Battle


You should probably change the CoffinGrendel’s HP from:

CoffinGrendel:350
CoffinRight:400

to

CoffinGrendel:200
CoffinRight:175

The reason why I suggest this is because, It’s not that this battle should be easy - it shouldn’t be easy - but this just seems like the right amount of time for players to familiarize themselves with the battle system, before moving on with the rest of the game.

Now, This next scene was really difficult look at, since there’s a lot going on here, I’m really not quite sure what you could do to shorten it, except to just really emphasize what’s happening in this scene.







For this one, every time I read this line:

“A friendly reminder, I wouldn’t look up if I were you.”

I always misread it as this is something Duram is saying and skip it, missing Lutwig’s “pointing up” animation entirely. If you add an ellipsis to this line, or a pause, it might get the player to pay closer attention.




You have to somehow shorten these lines or separate them into complete sentences. It doesn’t make sense to have these lines spread across two text windows. Your game has really good dialogue, but if it’s too difficult to read, then players will be less likely to pay attention to it.





There’s nothing wrong with this particular line, but breaking it up may give more emphasize on Lutwig’s character. He’s saying it’s not just an umbrella and the next line gives his reasons as to why, revealing more about his character.





Here Duram and Priss are both trying to get Lutwig’s attention, but the problem is that it’s a bit excessive for the player to have to read the same line twice. Are they calling Lutwig’s name one after the other or at the same time? You should try and revise this so that there’s some variation between these two lines so that these characters are not just saying the same thing twice.



The rest here are just minor revisions, this is not too important. But I thought I’d post it anyways

Most of this scene is okay, but what I want to focus on is the ending here. You’ve wrapped this scene up quite nicely as it fades to black; the problem is these next few lines.



Duram, Lutwig and Priss lines summarize the events up to this point.
Normally, it would be okay to leave this in, if you didn’t have a narrator.

But because you have a narrator, these lines become excessive. By having Duram, Lutwig and Priss commenting one last time before moving onto the next scene you’re taking away the role you’ve established for your narrator.

I imagine, this narrator is quite significant to tying the story together, so it would be better to just leave Duram and Lutwig’s lines out - Though, you could squeeze in Priss’s line after the fade out.

This next scene is a bit of a problem. The problem isn’t just that it’s too long, but it’s also too hard to follow what everyone is saying here because it isn’t in the right format.





This line is a bit confusing:

“Personally I find it to be a bunch of techno garbage from outdated models.”



When Malwulf says “it”, is he referring to the fact that Mechah Mechanical is now filled with humans or the fact that Mechah Mechanical is filled with secrets? Either way you should take this line out, because it isn’t very clear what he’s referring to and it kind of slows down the pace of this cut scene overall.

If you’re trying to say older models believed that Mechah Mechanical is filled with many secrets, maybe change “many secrets” in the previous line to “the myth of it’s many secrets” to quickly get the point across – that Malwulf wants to reclaim Mechah Mechanical, but doesn’t believe in the secrets, that older models that have told him.





You should have the “garbage cleaning drone” line, come up before this one. Not only is Malwulf saying Corxx is unfit to be general; but that Corxx is so unfit to be general that he should be considered “garbage” and Malwulf wants to aspire above that. Having these two lines switched strengthens Malwulf’s motivation and makes for very colorful dialogue.





There’s this rule in writing called “Show, don’t tell”, I try not to think too much about it because I personally find this rule too confusing to apply when writing something first hand.

But basically, you might want to take out this line, simply because Malwulf already states earlier, his hatred for humans – so your audience can naturally assume, they all hate humans unless it’s stated otherwise - Like, It’s a lot easier and much more effective to create lines that demonstrate this hatred:

“Now it's filled with disgusting Humans!
Poking and proding, hoping they will
unlock the myth of it's many secrets!”

Rather than using, two lines to explain it to your audience why your characters feel this way.

“We machines are programmed to consider them below us in everyway.”


The rest of this you might want to cut out simply because it’s restating what was already said much earlier and drags on the cut scene for too long.


At this point, you don’t need to explain anything else to the player.

All they need to know right now is that
1) the Professor, a human, is going to plan a breach from inside Mechah Mechanical
2) Malwulf’s forces will arrive shortly after that and
3) if all goes according to plan, this will supposedly be a victory for the Machine King of the Neon Empire.

You do not need to go into specific detail as to how they’re going to carry out this assault as the player is going to eventually see this anyways

Now, there may be a way squeeze in something that shows Bastard’s incompetence as a leader and his devotion to Malwulf – I revised it a bit to reflect that - But, there’s already so much going in this one scene, anymore would take away from Malwulf’s strongly established desire to succeed as a lowly security force unit and his distrusting feelings towards the Professor and humans in general.

I’m not gonna add too much to this next scene except for the usual revisions.


There are some lines in here that you might want to take out - in particular, when Duram asks what Mac has been up to:

“Maybe. What about you? I haven’t seen you since the Signal Corps.”



You’ll want to take these lines out - It’s been commonly debated when writing dialogue, whether characters “should-sound-like-how-‘real people’-sound-like-when-they’re-talking” and the answer is no, they shouldn’t, because in a real conversation, you can say anything. But when you’re writing dialogue, your main concern will always be time - to be able to get as much information out of these characters, in as few lines as possible.

Yes, there will be times when you can have an authentic conversation between two characters. But even then, you should be cutting down their lines to a particular structure, so they can only say what’s significant to that particular scene – We already get a sense Mac has a history with Duram because of this line he said earlier:

“Mac? You’re apart of the Rescue Squad now? Just how long was I out?
this is perfect. You don’t need to mention anything else - If you still feel it's worth mentioning that Mac was formerly apart of Signal Corps, you could mention it through an NPC or when the player speaks to Mac again later on, but right now, that's enough for this particular scene.

So take these lines out, but leave the rest in, because the rest of these lines further emphasizes that history:



Mac is the one who pushed Duram to become leader, which is significant. That’s all the player really needs to know from this scene at this point before moving on.







“They’re incapable of working with other Rudira squads because of how they act, and yet you’re able to coordinate them to victory.”

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this line, but “because of how they act” isn’t very clear and there’s so much already being said in this scene, so I tried to shorten it and make it a bit more to the point – That the reason why Duram is such a good leader is because he’s the only one who can actually make this squad “work” and that this is sort of significant to Duram’s character and his newly aquired role as a leader.


I'll admit, these last few revisions for this particular scene are kind of scattered, but hopefully from the previous examples I posted above, you're beginning to see why I made these revisions: Like Malwulf's scene, this scene was just too long and most of the stuff said here could be cut down to two or three significant sentences, while keeping the most important stuff intact. Ultimately, what you want to achieve is to create dialogue that's more concise and to the point.

So I made two revisions. The one on the left is straight forward and to the point and is the one people will probably want you to stick to for now since time is apparently an issue.

BUT I think you should stick with the one on the right or write something similar to it, because it’s still short enough and to the point that you’re still able to retain that history Duram has with Mac so that it becomes a cutscene with a purpose.



Now, again, all these revisions are far from perfect, but it should give you a better idea of how to proceed with cleaning up these scenes. Realistically speaking, it’s virtually impossible to have a great script on the first draft. So having someone look over it like this, should be consider normal.

But I want to make this next part very clear - The ONLY way to write good dialogue is to write bad dialogue first and then improve upon it. There’s no way around this.

If you try to write “good dialogue” first, with all these rules, your lines are just going to sound forced and it will stifle any creative voice you’re trying to establish for your characters.

It’s only through constant revision, taking it apart, assessing how much time these lines take and then putting it back together -from bad dialogue- that a solid script can actually take form.

Either way I hope you’ll take these suggestions into consideration. This game, Rainbow Nightmare: Libra, really is something else. I've never really posted that much on RMN, unless it’s something that really catches my attention. So I really hope you continue to work on Rainbow Nightmare till completion. I can’t begin to describe how good this game is - the ideas, the endless amount of creativity, the attention to detail - except that it’s “exceptional”.

This is the type of game that should have been made when rpgmaker2003 was first released – Honestly, it’s taken 10 years for these “real” games to finally come out.

Looking forward to the rest TFT,

EDIT: RevisedRNITRO1
I decided to add a link to these revisions since, pictures and text can only do so much.

Again, thanks for releasing this demo.