Narrative Design - Dialogue

One of the biggest tasks for me at the beginning of the project was designing the dialogues for the characters in the game. Doing this sets a baseline for the tone of the game, and can elevate or undermine other aspects of the design. It is also absolutely key for getting a sense of the characters.

I have a lot of experience writing dialogue generally. I've written two novels, each with a diverse cast of characters who had their own voice. I really enjoy writing dialogue, finding a middle ground between melodrama and comedy, making speech sound realistic and appropriate to the characters. But I was aware from the get-go that writing dialogue for a video game was a different kettle of fish. As is evident from my writing in my blogs, I favour run-on sentences and pad out my wording. This is my own voice, and is definitely stylistic. In a novel this works fine, as readers are... well, reading, and are happy to do so. But a major criticism of narrative-driven video games is that they make the player read too much. Whether this is a reasonable criticism or not is beside the point, video games are an active experience, and lengthy, compound sentences may lose the attention on many players. So rather than try to shoe-horn the knowledge I had into this context, I looked at other games that I felt executed their dialogue well.

I looked to games like Nightschool's Oxenfree and Afterparty, which, whilst tackling much more adult topics that Maive, sold itself to me on the strength of their dialogue before anything else. Night In The Woods was also a source of inspiration, as was A Short Hike. The sentences are short, but the voices remain distinct. Often characters have idioms that they use in speech that sets them aside from others. One character in A Short Hike talks exclusively in capital letters, conveying urgency and intensity from that character that's comically out of place in their surroundings. I took a lot of inspiration from this to write my dialogue.

Rather than tackling the big conversations first, I started writing conversations between Maive and NPCs. The quick, readable back and forth between minor characters helped me establish Maive's voice. When I designed her initially, I wanted her to have attitude, a quiet, almost jaded wisdom, and be gently funny. I punctuate a lot of her phrases with "..."s, to give the impression that she's thinking before she speaks. This can also be used comically as a single response to something odd another character says. In a fantastical, cute world, she seems to be a point of sanity, almost interacting with characters in a way that acknowledges the occasional absurdity of the game (in that it is so far from our reality). Writing the NPC dialogue also gave me an opportunity to demonstrate world building to the player, throwing in references to places or things that are real only in our game universe. This dialogue pads out the world and makes it feel more immersive.

Once I felt I had a good grip on her voice, I tested it out in her conversation with Lennie. The conversations are long, and I'm aware that a lot of gamers won't be interested in reading through them all. Solving this issue came down to game design external to the dialogues - e.g. breaks in the dialogue for action/movement and punctuating every long conversation with the main storybook mechanic. However some of this came down to the dialogue design itself. For example, in both Lennie and Garveet's conversations with Maive, there is a moment within the dialogue in which Maive ends the conversation and walks away, providing the other character with an opportunity to actively ask for her help. This not only breaks the conversation down into smaller chunks, it also demonstrates Maive's personality, as someone who won't force help on people, rather nudge them to realise they need help and ask for it.

Lennie's voice is purposefully young. Not childlike, but he does his fair share of inappropriate yelling that demonstrates his naivety and general lack of self-awareness, or awareness for those around him. This childishness is equal parts endearing and annoying, and Maive reacts in kind, not tolerating his shouting but not shutting him out altogether.

Garveet was the most fun character to write. His speech is absurd, with an elevated, holier-than-thou tone and an almost obnoxious use of synonyms to make him appear more intelligent. I was worried that this would make him unlikeable, but actually his voice is so extreme it's very comical, and, on closer inspection, a clear overcompensation that shows his self-doubt and vulnerability. In all of the testing I have done of the dialogue, Garveet is the most loved character.

I also used Maive's conversation with Garveet as an opportunity for Maive to be vulnerable. This was both to demonstrate her backstory, but it also plays nicely opposite a character who shields his vulnerability as though it were a weakness. There's a refreshing strength in Maive's candour, and her willingness to show her emotions without shame. Within the conversation, this frankness acts as a way to draw Garveet out of his prideful shell. Of all the emotional moments in the game, the bonding between Maive and Garveet is both my favourite, and a favourite of play-testers.

When I began writing Nomena's conversation with Maive, I assumed that it would be the easiest. However, when it came to voicing such a young character, I didn't want her to be stereotypical. I didn't want her to be a vehicle to show Maive's strength and capability, in which she has no personality and just makes Maive look mature and in control. To combat this I made Nomena call out Maive's patronising questions, despite being upset and vulnerable. I also made Maive's confidence falter, with her openly saying to herself that she doesn't know how to deal with children. This interaction is supposed to show how Maive's emotional state is mirroring Nomena's. Therefore, rather than putting Maive in a full-on "rescuer" position, the player can see her insecurities and weaknesses unravel the closer she gets to her home. But the interaction still remains a victory, with Nomena finding her own way home, and Maive feeling comforted by her company.

All the different aspects of the dialogue are intentional, and I tweaked conversations constantly based on feedback from play-testers. That being said, the response was positive, and after a few rewrites players could prove an understanding of both the current happenings in the game, and Maive's past.

Later on I revisited the NPC dialogues to provide more than just flavour and backstory to the conversations. After replaying A Short Hike, I noticed that the developer had very cleverly input instructions for all of the game's mechanics into the dialogue, and every instruction given to players about how to play the game is given by another character. What I thought was really good about this is that it was all in the context of the game world, but there was a tongue-in-cheek awareness about it that took potentially immersion-breaking moments and made them charming. After experiencing this, and with following some discussion about how we would communicate the game controls to veteran players and players who had never played a game before alike, I peppered little tutorial conversations into the NPC dialogues. I also added in hints towards secrets we've hidden in the game world, like Maive's hideout, and the lesser advertised memory mechanic.

Thoughts

A feature that we added halfway through the development process to tackle some issues were Maive's thoughts. In an effort to make the game more interactive, the berry-picking mechanic that we had designed became pivotal to some of the conversations in the game, most importantly: Lennie's. To show a game responsiveness to player choice, we decided that Lennie would only speak to you if you'd picked some berries from the bushes around town, and barred Maive's progress to the Clifftop Campsite if the hadn't picked any. This would force the player back into town to get the berries, and also force them to walk past Lennie on their way to the campsite.

In order to signal this to the player, we decided to give Maive thought bubbles that pop up above her head at certain points under certain conditions. So if Maive tries to walk the path up to the campsite without any berries in her inventory, a thought bubble will pop up over her head with a contextualised thought about how she has nothing to eat, and should go and pick some berries.

This was the practical application of the thoughts to begin with. I was aware, however, that if thoughts appeared only when the player had missed something, it would stick out as a design feature, rather than just a character expressing their thoughts. I decided to write more thoughts to pad these moments out, and used it as an opportunity to get into the main character's head.

The main bulk of Maive's thoughts accompany her discovering memories in the environment. There are five memories in total, depicting Maive at different times in her life doing different things. More can be read about it in my memory mechanic post. The memories speak for themselves, similar to the extra collectibles in Arise: A Simple Story.

What I thought would be interesting, however, is if Maive commented on them, showing her emotions about the memory, demonstrating the time that has passed between that moment and the moment she's in now. I hope these thoughts will give players a further glimpse into Maive's mind, as it provides an opportunity for Maive to express herself without being heard. In all the dialogues, she's interacting with someone else, which is great for showing how she behaves in relationships with others, but not how she behaves by herself. Thus I attached simple thoughts to each of the memories that gives the player a little more information about Maive, the world, or both.

After we released our first build on itch.io, we got some feedback that it was sometimes difficult to know what the aim of the game was straight off the bat. There were a lot of NPCs in our first area when the build went live, who we have since moved to less distracting locations, making sure the player stays on track. But to add another layer of direction, I used Maive's thoughts as a tool to direct players. These thoughts come up at the beginning of the game, with Maive hinting at things she wants to do, places she wants to go, so the player can understand her personal goals and fall in line with them.