While writing my own game, I’ve come across the fact that I need to write dialogue for characters.
Are there any rules when writing dialogue
Like which format is better
is the format working where you write the name of a character and his lines, and repeat until the scene is over??
eg
You - You can never win this battle
Enemy - Try me and see
You can try looking at other people’s work here to see what the norm is.
I haven’t seen other than quotes and tags to ride along the conversation that add up to the scene, or the classic “she says” “${character_name} says”. But I’m a total beginner so other people can advise you better.
“You can never win this battle!” You say, pointing your finger at the enemy.
“Try me and see,” he responds with a mischievous grin.
I’ve made the mistake of using em-dash at the beginning, cause that’s what it’s used in my main language so I had to correct a bunch of stuff. I’ll add that if I can find it.
edit:
Yeah, here it is…
Most of the time, I would suggest trying to format the dialogue as if it’s a book rather than a game, if you’re makijg your game in ChoiceScript that is.
Every COG game I’ve worked on has dialogue written the same as static fiction (just from a tight second-person, which is pretty rare outside of IF).
The only exceptions have been telepathic messages, which are often italic and set apart in a new paragraph with no quotation marks, and text messages in contemporary games like Book of Hungry Names which are formatted as you describe.
Like others, I recommend you play a few games or at least the free demos to see how others have done it.
I remember HG publishing a game a few years ago that used quotation dashes, and a lot of people complained about it as confusing, although I didn’t mind. (I found the game hard to follow for other reasons, though.)
There’s also a published game where some of the dialogue is written like a play, with the character’s name followed by a colon and then the words they were saying, and that was outright mocked in certain corners of the internet.
Which would, of course, be a correct way to write dialogue if one was writing a play.
So it depends on what you’re writing.
(I find quotation dashes in dialogue confusing, and I was taught how to use them in school. There’s just too much ambiguity with them for my taste.)
Well, considering this was posted in a thread about game development, it seemed fairly obvious to me that we weren’t talking about how to write a play.
I mean, it could always be an interactive screenplay. But yeah, I was trying to be more general.
That was not my intention, I apologize. I was attempting to answer the OP’s question expanding on what you said.
And I apologize too. I think I see how you meant it, and in that sense it was a fair point. I just have my hackles up today for some reason. Thank you for being so gracious about it.