Oh, I wasn’t clear! it’s my Patreon profile picture - here.
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Yesterday, something weird happened. 
I guess I’ll share it with all of you. It could be helpful.
It happened during the ‘Random Test’ of my game.
To fully understand what is going on, I have to make a spoiler: in my game, when you ‘die,’ you do NOT reach ‘finish,’ BUT you go back to the start again. You CANNOT exit the game until you find the way to actually ‘finish’ it. This is meant to simulate what happens in life according to the Buddhist concept of Samsara.
Shortly said, when I run the Random Test on Last Dream, the system went crazy.
What I mean is that no single Random test could be completed; the system continued running in circles without ever finishing ONE SINGLE TIME!
That made me proud in the first place, but then I realized my game would NEVER be published if it didn’t pass the Random test!
So I went to the Choicescript Wiki and realized there is a specific command to “force” a choice during Randomtest. Thanks to that command, everything runs smoothly now.
I wanted to share this with all of you. If the Random Test goes crazy, guide it! 
You can use the command *if choice_randomtest as stated here.
This command actually ‘saved my game,’ and I’m thrilled to share this ‘life-saving hint’ with all of you.
I have to say: ChoicesScript is a great programming language, and its programmer is a genius! Congratulations to all the staff! 
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ooh, I remember coming across that before - something where the RandomTest went in a loop not being able to decide on a PC name, I think. Glad it’s sorted out now!
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Ahaha, that’s me every time a game doesn’t give name options! 
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I’m really happy with my progress this month. I’m about 3/4 done with chapter 11 (hoping to complete it in the next two weeks). And I finally made a map for my game 
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Ooooh, that’s really useful to know!
What I have been doing is just set a variable of my own which does essentially the same thing–but it’s way less convenient because I have to manually set it to true every time I’m doing randomtest.
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Hello everyone,
I haven’t been active on here for a while but I did have a question for everyone here pertaining to some dialouge writing advice. I started doing in-character interviews (As I was helpfully recommended to do so here, thank you so much for that advice 
) on my tumblr to better understand my characters and how they talk. But the weird thing is, I don’t know if it’s just me but I realize all my characters sound the same when they talk? It sounds weird out loud but I have read many books and I know characters sound different because of the way they talk and how the writer correctly wrote them to speak.
I’ll include an example of my writing so that maybe it could better convey what I mean by my characters sounding the same when they are supposed to have different personalities. But overall, any advice on how to writing dialouge from different characters and not have them all sound the same?
Question for Mother/Mentor: Did she ever want to have a child/children prior to taking MC in?
Her Response
Miss June’s face drops a little, and her eyes lose sight focus of only a moment before she restrains them on you.
“Oh, well I am afraid I don’t know her very well; my little one. We only met a few brief times when I was a child, the reason for which I sadly don’t know.” She lets out a small huff of air, mustering a forced, sad smile as she continues on.
“But what I do know, is that she was a very lovely woman who would sometimes on rare nights, visit me and my father in our home near the sea.” Her voice begins to sound more nostalgic, her fake smile slowly becoming a real one. Her eyes seem to be looking right through you; as if staring at something far, far, away.
“She was beautiful; in her own rugged way, I suppose. I remember her being quite tall and her arms being very strong when she held me. She would lift me up as if I weighed nothing at all and would spin me around effortlessly despite my father’s chastising!” She giggles slightly at the memory.
“She would never stay long though, always coming right around my bedtime. She would hold me close as I would beg her to stay with us, never really giving me an answer to why she would always leave. She would just comb her calloused fingers through my hair and sing me old lullabies that came from our people but were mostly forgotten.”
A moment of silence falls over the two of you, her eyes look sad again and she now rests a hand over her chest.
“She had the most lovely singing voice…” She whispers.
“Her voice was so angelic, it really didn’t quite match her face if i’m honest. It would always put me right to sleep, no matter how hard I fought to stay awake. I would often wake up crying, because she would always gone come morning light. I would sometimes ask my father if I had dreamed her up, even though he often refused to talk about her when she wasn’t there; he did one time tell me I would understand one day.”
She suddenly snaps her azure blue gaze right back on me, with a very sad look in her eyes.
“Sadly, to this day I don’t understand a thing. I don’t know who or where she is, I don’t even know her name. And my father isn’t exactly still around for me to ask…”
She politely clears her throat, just as her eyes were starting to become misty; she lets out a nervous smile as she moves to stand.
“I’m sorry, my treasure. I didn’t mean to get so blue! How about we start on dinner huh? Anything you want!”
She swiftly ends the conversation and turns away from her pain to focus on something else, something you’ll soon come to know; is very typical of her.
Question for Ludovica: What is one experience she would absolutely like to share with MC?
Her Response
“Hmm.” She rubs her hands and tilts her head, as she ponders for a moment. “I don’t have many happy memories prior to meeting you, I’m afraid.” Her voice is soft and muted, not because she is particularly sad but because she is being genuine.
Her eyes shine as they look into yours and she smiles, “I like crocheting on the balcony and taking walks through the garden, though I doubt you’d define that as a particularly riveting experience.” She lets out a small laugh, fueled by a mix of a little self-deprecation and a bit out of the irony that her only positive memories while living alone in this villa all these years are dull activities.
“Though, if it were something that would be new to me and that I would like to experience with you; I think I would like to walk along a beach with you… watching a sunset.” Her cheeks flush slightly and she raises her hands to partly hide her face. “I know it sounds rather cheesy… but I read it in a book once, of a couple holding hands as they walked along the shoreline; gazing out into the sunset as they quietly basked in their love… I always found that passage so beautiful. I would sometimes dream that I had a love that pure, just like the couple in that book.”
She looks up towards you, peeking out from behind her bashful stance from behind her hands, her voice sounding quiet, tender and very vulnerable, “We have a love that pure, don’t we…?”
I tried using a lot of descriptions of their actions to differentiate them and add quite a few periods to accentuate when they are speaking a little more meekly. But they both sound the same to me!
Am I just going crazy?
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I use different tricks to help differentiate characters.
Sometimes, I use different dialogue noises: “Ugh!”, “Argh!” etc., and other times I reserve sayings or phrases for specific characters.
An example that comes to mind is in BG3, one of the companion characters ALWAYS reacts with “Tshck” (or something close to it) whenever another character says something disagreeable to her. No other character says this, so after a bit it becomes one of her characteristics.
Sometimes, characters that are all from the same geographical area or who are from the same “social strata” will sound alike. For example, a Liverpool dockworker will sound like other Liverpool dock-workers.
A character’s attitude in life can change how they converse as well.
Here is a small 100ish word sample of how I try to build differentiation into the dialogue:
If you’d like, we can dm about specifics that you are concerned with.
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For my two cents
To me, the characters in your example read like they have different life experiences but similar cultural/social backgrounds, and similar emotional landscapes. It’s a little trickier to write those voices differently just by virtue of the shared territory. Maybe you could play around with sentence lengths? Some random ideas to get the brainstorming going: If one of them is meant to be “down to earth” then their sentences might be more direct and short on average. If one is self-conscious they might alternate speaking in long sentences and going quiet, whereas someone more confident would be more consistent with how they speak. You could also experiment with adding more characters. If you have a character with a snarky streak or something, that’d certainly contrast the two characters here.
Also, your characters seem interesting 
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Thank you.
The thing is those two characters have different backgrounds but slightly similar emotional tendencies. Messing with the sentence length is an interesting idea, I think I’ll try that!
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I may have gotten sidetracked in the last week, but I’m really happy with my entry for the romance game jam. It’s a bite-sized game set on the same island as my WIP for Heart’s Choice, so there’s some similar worldbuilding, though the characters are completely different.
This was my first try at short IF, and at writing cozy fantasy. I mean, there are always cozy moments in my stories, but there’s usually epic stakes. It was freeing to write this little game around a dinner date that evolves into writing poetry together. The poetry bit was inspired by @HarrisPS’s comment in another thread.
It’s only 4000 words: short and sweet and a little spicy (there is a NSFW ending). I promised I’d drop the link in this thread, so without further ado:
Edit: Aletheia Knights beta tested and proofread this entry (thank you!). I designed the cover on Canva.
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Nearly finished the solo v old man daemon fight and set up the code for the pair v old man daemon variation. I’m not going to hit my target of having Chapter Two finished by the end of January thanks to losing about six days to illness. I’m hopeful I will at least have one daemon hunt fully finished.
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I got to play Poetry and Passion last night, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves romance and/or vivid, sensuous writing. As Leia says, it’s short, sweet, and optionally a bit spicy, and I wish it were an episode in a longer work so I could enjoy more of this setting and these characters.
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OMG I totally forgot to credit you here. (Fixed it.) But let me take a moment for a shout out. ALETHEIA IS THE BEST EVER! Not only has Aletheia beta tested Poetry & Passion, she did some fantastic beta testing for TMP, and beta read the novel I wrote adapted from the game.
In case no one has told you today, @AletheiaKnights, you’re AMAZING!
Also, you know I think of you every time I write a food scene, right?
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Hey, @Fable, I’m certainly no expert on crafting believable and unique character dialogue, and I know even professional writers need help with the same dilemma that you are having. And I don’t have any specific advice. I will sometimes act out their dialogue out loud (giving my kids all the proof they need for their dad’s insanity) Sometimes, I can enlist my wife to voice lines of dialogue, like she’s auditioning for a part. I have a very patient wife, and it doesn’t hurt that she wanted to become an actress when she was younger. The other advice I can give you is to read or listen to Dialogue by Robert McKee. That is actually where I got the idea to speak my dialogue. Good luck!
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Awwwww, thank you so much! And thank you for being a great author to beta-read for! (Seriously, all my copyediting and commentary for Poetry and Passion took me under an hour, not just because it was so short but because it didn’t need much polishing.)
I think we must have a culinary psychic link, because what I had for dinner last night, before you sent me the game link, was spiral pasta with tomato sauce.
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That’s too good.
The game I’m writing for HC has a lot of the same feel in setting and worldbuilding. Who knows, maybe I’ll add more chapters to P&P at some point. For now, I need to get back to my WIP. This was a super fun side project, and writing it in the same world helped me know that setting more fully. Now I know what happens at a full moon party at the top of the island in the temple city (WIP) and what a full moon celebration looks in the city at the base of the mountain (P&P).
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Is your WIP set in the same world as TMP?
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Yes it is. 
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Yay!!!
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