A big huge challenge I had early on – and still grapple with – was writing NPCs. This agony comes in two parts: adding interest, and keeping a thread.

Adding Interest

There’s a large town at the start of Project Harvest with a bunch of folks you can talk to. I wanted them to add color to the world and tell the player interesting stuff. After plugging in heaps of dialog and playtesting, I found that it was BORING as HELL!!!!!!

It’s so hard to write interesting dialog!!!!
What are all these LOSERS talking about!!!!
Buh buh buh go here buh buh like… Man.

After bitching about it to my partner we decided I’d try a ‘silly pass’ on most of the dialog – just make it absurd and see how far it can stretch.

Classic ‘guy blocking house’ in action.

It felt much better. I’m not sure if I’ve gone too far with it in some cases but I’ve determined I’d rather go far towards fun and dial back than have to push out.

Keeping a Thread

What do I mean by this? Basically, it’s keeping the subject of dialogs relevant and connected.

If something important is happening the game should acknowledge it – characters should talk about it and have opinions on it. The (simulated) collective unconscious presented to the player feels to me like it should be mostly resonant unless discord is intentional for a specific impact.

In RPG Maker MV, looking at dialog requires opening the specific event that houses the dialog. Because it is nested, it’s easy for some people to forget what’s been written!!!!! 🙂

After suffering for a while I decided to write the script in Google Sheets. This has the benefit of letting me see multiple conversations AND I can automatically apply formatting that my text plugins require.

This is actually very thrilling to me.