I think it would be neat to be able to format text with a hanging indent in ChoiceScript. It may make dialogue scenes easier to read. Example:
Suggested code to achieve the above:
*dialogue "Dan The Man" Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. [etc.]
At the risk of sounding ignorant, but…
are dialogues in CS games usually, y’know, NOT written in scriptformat?
They “usually” aren’t because, to my knowledge, there’s no current way to format text in ChoiceScript in a hanging indent without altering the base code.
I just thought it would be cool to have another option to choose from.
But honestly:
Where would this find application in stories?
Boxing a text (aka having a border around it), for example might work for ingame letters, notes, etc.
But for this I can’t really think of any application outside of a very narrow margin of genres (police procedural, journalism) where you’d have an interview or something.
Maybe in a glossary, but how many games do these?
You could be right.
You could be wrong.
You could be both.
You could be neither.
However, I don’t think the style choice you’re suggesting is absolute.
Sometimes, I think, this would be useful, for example when there’s a few more people engaged in conversation or when someone is talking for a long time.
Only downside would be that to look good throughout the whole game, in this instance, it’d have to be used every time someone says something and I believe that would just make it weird and interrupt the flow of the text.
Perhaps it would be a good thing to add so you do have the choice of using it rather than not being given the choice.
As @MeltingPenguins said, I think it would be great for example in-game notes and letters, but maybe not for so much more.
The problem with doing that is that on a really small screen, say a mobile device, you’re wasting a lot of space that could have text in it and the way the lines get cut off would probably not look good. That’s one of the reasons it’s not done in ebooks - most ebook publishers don’t even give you the option to format text in such a way. If you try to force it, your ebook can be rejected.