Thread by @CotretJulien

@CryingSuns is a text heavy roguelite that required us to write a lot of events (>300) to breathe life into this interplanetary travel. It required a lot of back and forth between the amazing @IanReiley and myself, so we came up with our own format⤵️
#narrativedesign

The game engine was not really ready to test events when we started to write (which is a bad idea btw) but the planning needed us to start anyway. Also most events had a length constraint to avoid disrupting the flow, so we didn't need too much branching within dialog

Requirements were:
-> Being able to write easily in a ready to export format
-> Human readable to share it with the (non writing) team. We like sharing wip for feedbacks at @AltShift_Games
-> Easy to comment and work collaboratively

We tested a few tools but none of them felt "natural" given our requirements. It's also worth noting that we were quite blue on the narrative design side, so we hadn't much experience with existing tools or software and most of them felt more like slowing us down than helping us

So we came up with this in-house format. It's plain text written in a google doc, with some syntax highlighting provided by a plugin we implemented. This way we could write easily within a regular word processor, benefiting from built-in revision, commenting and versioning

It's mostly like theater dialogs with meta
-> Tags, meta info to have some controls over the setup the event could appear in
-> Triggers to control the flow of things happening during the dialogs
-> A simple branching system to display choices and navigation logic

Events still needed a lot of tweaking once we were able to import and test them in the game engine, and honestly the whole process would have been easier if we could have tested our work ingame from the start, but it's been rather efficient for the heavy lifting nonetheless!