Second of two blog posts scheduled for September 25, 2022.

To kind of help get me into a groove with how I want to write dialogue, I've been using a fantastic website called Trails in the Database to get a feel for how the dialogue in the Trails games flow, given it's one of the major inspirations for my writing going forward. If anyone's curious, one of my others is AdmiralStyles' Love and War, which is equally as verbose (and I love it).

In that vein, I've been working in Scrivener (a fantastic tool for writing if you're at all interested) creating "game script files" of NPC and story dialogue. It feels like Falcom kind of just kitchen-sinked the writing in Trails in the Sky where they have seeming drafts of interactions along with the actual text that gets called in the game. So I've also been writing multiple versions of the same conversation in kind of a drafting format.

As one of the major inspirations for the dialogue is the Trails series, every NPC has a name and has their own life outside of the player talking to them. So because of that, I've been writing different dialogue for each NPC depending on when in the narrative the player talks to them, who's in the party, what other NPCs the player has talked to, whether the player has actually talked to that NPC before in the first place... Though it's not necessarily the machine learning dialogue branching that Emily Short posits as the true evolution of dynamic narratives, it's closer in state to the dynamic authorial leverage that Jacob Garbe puts forth in his PhD dissertation (and more succinctly in his article about the same found on his GitHub).

In layman's terms, expect every NPC to be unique and have not just one line of dialogue, but many based on progress and player interaction in the world.

tl;dr, here's an image example of one such exchange with a character from Vera's past, while being accompanied by her civilian childhood friend Amiee, if the player has not talked to said character the first chance they're able to. Note: This is still draft dialogue and is subject to change in the final product.



I hope this gives a neat glimpse into the writing style and eventual feel of Sagawind going forward!