The Powargrid campaign contains quite a lot of dialogue, so it's about time for a blog post about that. Nearly all of the dialogues were written by me (Willem), but Michiel and I have discussed them a lot. Part of that discussion is about language and wording, but we often also talk about the amount of dialogue in there. Michiel is worried that there may be too much dialogue for (as far as I know) two reasons. First off, there are lots of players who don't read dialogues and don't want to be bothered by them either. Secondly, writing dialogue takes time and building a good game is already such an incredible amount of work that we should be reluctant to add to that.
We still disagree on the second point. For now, I'll just keep on spewing out more concept-dialogue until all the missions are covered. The good news is that I have at least a rough outline for each mission now. We'll still have the occasional 'OMG, we're making a game, not writing a book' versus 'if you want me to write less, it will take me even more time' discussion, but I firmly believe this is one of the things that makes Powargrid a much better game in the end. As an aside: this is somewhat unusual, since Michiel and I usually find common ground quite quickly if we have a disagreement. Our discussions usually amount to something like this: 'I think X.' 'Oh, I think !X.' 'Ah, well I really think X.' 'OK, but can't we make it explode and then go for !X?' 'Sure, if it's a really satisfying explosion, !X it is.'
On the first point, that dialogue shouldn't get in the way of players who don't want to read it, we agreed from the outset. This led me to condensing the dialogues as much as possible, which actually led to them becoming better*. And that worked, since we've gotten quite a lot of positive feedback, but it wasn't enough. Luckily, the solution turned out to be simpler than we'd thought (and pretty obvious in hindsight). I'd already written the dialogues in such a way that the shortest route through them became somewhat clear from the text of the reply, but that was way too easy to miss. Michiel eventually suggested to add a little text balloon to the dialogues with '...' in the balloon that carries you more dialogue and 'X' in the balloon that gets you back into the game.
Another thing I've made sure of is that you can get out of most dialogues in one click, with the exceptions being mostly the dialogues that explain game mechanics or other important stuff like mission objectives. While the text balloons help to guide players through the dialogues they don't want to read, they do nothing to get them to read the few dialogues we do want them to read. So we added two different markers to the dialogues. One is a black and yellow border for dialogue nodes that are important to read and the other is highlighted text for the essential bits in those nodes. That way even people who don't like to read dialogue can't miss the game mechanics and the mission objectives. Or almost everybody. Our good friend Marnix would rather spend an hour cursing that 'this stupid WoW quest is broken!' than spend three minutes reading the quest text. Why would you even want to know you have to use your Gnomish demorphification ray on those froggified dwarves when you can brutally murder them (and then skin them) as they're happily croaking the song of their people?** But for others, those simple adjustments made quite the difference.
We also have future work planned on the dialogues, besides finishing and polishing them. We'd like to make sure that the choices you make in the campaign feel relevant. The missions in Powargrid don't lend themselves very well to branching storylines (and neither does our limited time for that matter), but we can make sure that dialogue choices made in one mission are referred to later in the campaign. The technical term here is the feeling of agency. For a good explanation on how this works in games, I recommend you watch this excellent episode of Extra Credits.
That just about sums up what I wanted to tell you about the dialogues in Powargrid. I could go into the storylines they weave, but that will have to wait for a future blog post.
-Willem-
-Willem-
* I feel a disclaimer is in order here: the dialogues beyond the fifth mission need some more work and mission 8, currently the last one playable in the demo, needs an extensive overhaul. I'm not one to be quickly satisfied with what I've written.
** Totally made-up WoW quest example. It's been a while since I last was in Azeroth :).
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