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Weekly Update - How Long Should Dialogue Scenes Be?

3 years ago1,312 words

I've been writing some dialogue scenes this week! Also my new PC arrived! And a bit of a follow-up about the Ukraine war and the post I wrote about that recently.

Have I been writing these on Fridays or Saturdays? I can't even remember!

Productivity's been fairly meh this week. I've done stuff every day, but not as much as I potentially could have due to the usual mental health issues. Random anxiety coming from nowhere. Do you ever experience this thing where, while sitting at your computer as normal, you feel like you're dizzy, falling, passing out or similar for just a split second for no apparent reason? No? I don't know if it's an anxiety thing or a result of my physical brain tumour etc. Probably a bit of both!

When I've not been working myself up about weird little sensations like that - there's always one little niggle, different every week, never multiple at once - I've been working on writing some dialogue scenes. Essentially, the starting area/dungeon/whatever (or the one after the nightmare intro), the Sprouting Isle, has a series of battles that begin with tutorial scenes that introduce gameplay mechanics one by one with a bit of character stuff to make them hopefully at least mildly interesting.

Back when I made MARDEK, the dialogue I wrote was very much whatever came to mind at the time, very much a first draft, barely edited, if at all. Each dialogue box tended to have quite a lot of words, too:



Around the time of Taming Dreams (I think?), I started aiming to structure dialogue scenes as a series of very short lines instead, just a handful of words per text box. That's the direction I'm going in with Atonal Dreams too. I'm also being very particular about the exact wording to make sure every short line flows well and connects with previous and/or future scenes and the story in general, or has value in itself. So even though the word count for each dialogue scene is probably significantly less than for most scenes in MARDEK, they're taking me longer to write.

(Though just getting older and feeling tired all the time are probably contributing factors for things taking longer, too.)

I noticed while playing Pokemon games recently - Legends: Arceus and Brilliant Diamond - that dialogue scenes in those tend to be extremely brief. Only a handful of dialogue boxes, each containing just a handful of words. But maybe that's the ideal length? They never felt too short, exactly, and I suppose many - most? - players would see dialogue as a nuisance to push through rather than a reward in itself. I still remember people saying they just skip all the dialogue in RPGs, including MARDEK. So alien to me.

I do wonder though how long dialogue scenes 'should' be! Are what I'm writing too long?

Here's a screenshot of one of the tutorial scenes I wrote this week, in the dialogue editor thing I made for myself:



The column on the right contains the spoken lines; if I click one, the scene switches to it and I can edit it. There are only a couple offscreen; I counted 36 with spoken words, the longest being similar to the one in the screenshot, the shortest being a single word (eg 'woof'). Oh, and there are some which are just second-long pauses.

These scenes play at the start of battles, meaning the characters were talking while the battle music played, which didn't feel right to me (especially since the 'Dynamusic' for battles is nonmelodic, as the melodies are added by the player summoning). So I spent an hour or two composing a special piece for them which I quite like, and which I hope will feel more appropriate than the battle music playing.

These scenes feel like the main big thing that I need to do before I can run another alpha test, and I've almost finished them now, I think? There aren't all that many of them. There are still some features and bugs I'll need to add fix though, and I suppose I still need to add particle and sound effects, hmm... I'm getting close to being done enough to move onto the next stage, though. Maybe I've been saying that for weeks!



My new PC has arrived! I've yet to take it out of its box though; I'll likely have to spend at least a day setting everything up and transferring over files. I wasn't certain of the best way to transfer large amounts of files, so I looked it up, and apparently people typically use external USB hard drives for that. I used a bridging cable last time, but I have no idea where it is anymore, and buying a new one seemed like it'd have limited usefulness compared to an external hard drive for about the same price, which I could use as an additional backup for at least some files. So I bought one of those, and can't do much with my new PC anyway until it arrives!

My parents are going on YET ANOTHER holiday next week, so I'm unsure how much work I'll be able to get done since I have to look after the neighbouring community hall and needy dog, which throws me off mentally more than it would for someone well-adjusted. I'd like to do at least something on Atonal Dreams, but I suppose I'll see how things turn out. If nothing else, hopefully I'll be able to set up my new PC and stuff.

I keep thinking about posting more music on Patreon and/or YouTube, but keep putting it off due to doubt that anyone would care.



Oh, and I wrote ∞ this post about the Ukraine war the other day ∞, and wanted to say something more about that because it apparently sounded like I was a 'Russian apologist' or something. I get the impression that when people typically speak out about things like this, if it's not purely virtue signalling, then it comes from a belief that their words would have some meaningful impact on the situation. Maybe as a result of negatively biased thinking - learned helplessness, a lack of self-efficacy - I believe that anything I'd say about how atrocious the war is or whatever would have zero impact on the reality of the situation, but what I can maybe control is how I feel about it, how anxious I am about it.

There's this well-known thing called the Serenity Prayer that was mentioned in pretty much all of the anxiety and meditation group things I went to:



I saw posts on Reddit about how Putin had GONE MAD and was likely to press the End World button because he was out of his mind, but understanding the complex political reasons behind his actions - that is, they weren't just a random act of gibbering madness, but more a calculated attempt at essentially self-preservation - calmed the fears I had about that outcome. I can't control what Putin will do, but I can control how much my imagination anxiously runs away with apocalyptic hypotheticals.

I've since read more about the lived experience of actual Russian citizens - and how much corruption and propaganda there is there - and it sounds truly terrible. I loathe how probably sociopathic individuals rise to power and make lives miserable for others purely for personal gain.

Like with anything outside my sphere of actual influence, though, I'll just keep observing from afar - trying to calm my anxiety enough to get work done - rather than changing my display picture to the Ukrainian flag or whatever. That sort of thing feels like using a tragic situation for personal gain to me.