Encounter Dialog Guidelines

A set of guidelines I authored for writing critical encounter dialog — any encounter with an objective or where the player could become confused, disoriented, or frustrated.

The Categories: I created four communicate categories that should be represented when creating any critical or semi-critical encounter — (1) Establish Player Motive, (2) Establish Player Goal(s), (3) Keep Player Updated, and (4) Keep Player Moving Forward.

You can have the best written dialog ever but if the timing and delivery is off it won't mean a thing. Timing for communicative dialog is critical and must be taken into consideration when writing and implementing it into the encounter as it will affect how the player will respond both emotionally and psychologically to the dialog.

The work flow for writing encounter dialog depends on the setup you're working in, but ideally the Level Designers themselves create the first pass dialog since they will be the most intimate with their encounters and know best what they need to communicate. More iterations can be made afterwards for quality. Two options help designers who aren't comfortable writing dialog:

Option A) Level Designers write the first pass dialog themselves.

Option B) Level Designers simply give brief descriptions for each encounter of what needs to be communicated to the player and by whom if it will be specific.

The work flow then runs through first, second, third, and final passes.

Sentence budget per encounter is really up to the platform you're developing on. Just use common sense and only say what you need to. It's easier to have too much dialog on paper than not enough and scrambling to write more.

These guidelines are open for interpretation, but by at least doing something similar you should have no problem creating clear and understandable dialog for your encounters. Remember, communicating to the player is of the utmost importance and should never be compromised… ever!