How do you guys write your dialogue?

[Enraged Slith]

I'm trying to keep my dialogue organized while designing my scenario in a chronological fashion (partly because I'm making it up as I go along), but I run into a problem where the character I'm writing for will have more to say later. I don't want my dialogue trees to end up in a chaotic mess, but I also want to continue working in this fashion.

 

Any advice?

[Lazarus.]

What do you mean by chaotic mess? Are you concerned that when you come back to add more dialog the new conversation line doesn't blend well with the old one, or are you talking about behind the scenes stuff like states and node numbers get messy?

[Enraged Slith]

I just like keeping my scripts neat. I hate the idea of having nodes and states mixed up all over the place, even if it's completely functional.

[Lazarus.]

Well you could just leave blank states and nodes in between NPCs. So if you finish NPC1's dialog and you're at node 15 state 5, start NPC2 at node 20 state 10 so that you can come back to NPC1 and add nodes without things getting confusing.

[Metatron]

Relevant: if anybody's spent the past ten years thinking "Man, I have Python set up on my computer but I'm too lazy to spend five minutes writing a script to append new nodes to my dialog files" well today is your lucky day.

 

gen new node.py

 

 

 

This Python script will probably find the latest unused node, and then fill in all the boilerplate: condition = 1, state = -1, text1 = "some text", all that stuff. Note that you need to have Python set up on your computer in order to run the script.

 

I also leave blank nodes.

[Kelandon]

Originally Posted By: Lazarus.

Well you could just leave blank states and nodes in between NPCs. So if you finish NPC1's dialog and you're at node 15 state 5, start NPC2 at node 20 state 10 so that you can come back to NPC1 and add nodes without things getting confusing.

Yeah, this is what I do/did. I'm usually pretty accurate about how many nodes I'll need, too, as you can see in Nobody's Heroes.

[Ephesos]

Originally Posted By: Lazarus.

Well you could just leave blank states and nodes in between NPCs. So if you finish NPC1's dialog and you're at node 15 state 5, start NPC2 at node 20 state 10 so that you can come back to NPC1 and add nodes without things getting confusing.

I do this as well. Generally I'll set aside 10-20 per NPC.

[nikki.]

Eh, I just come back and tack them onto the end. I mean, it's "messy", I guess, but it's never confusing because I have a flow diagram on a sheet of paper for each major NPC's conversation tree.

[Enraged Slith]

You guys are making it increasingly difficult to procrastinate.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Also, you don't need to sort your nodes in numerical order, which might help.