Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
its dialogue as a complete entity which will guide the way they look at the
fine details of the scenes and the lines they contain.The need for changes is
probably going to be great as the editor tries to establish a consistent style, so
if you are that editor make sure that enough time has been built into the
schedule for you to complete the task satisfactorily.
Testing and polishing
Before the dialogue for a game can be recorded, it must be thoroughly tested
to ensure that playing through does not throw up any discrepancies, over-
sights or logic bugs that could cause problems for players. If the game has a
non-linear plot and character interactions that take place in any order, the
dialogue testing can be quite complex and should be carried out by a
professional team employed by the development studio. In the case of games
that have a writing team, the writers should play each other's sections, which
not only will help to catch the bugs but will also show up any inconsistency
of style and help the script-editing process. Whatever the setup, the writers
will need to fix dialogue bugs as quickly as possible.
Story oversights and lack of clarity are usually pretty easy to fix with a few
additional lines or an additional scene or two. However, care should be taken
that the fixes themselves do not cause other problems and should be
thoroughly tested, too.
Logic bugs are potentially the biggest problem and can seriously affect the
way that a game plays and the story unfolds if they are not caught and fixed
accurately. Usually it is the implementation or design team that will hunt
down and fix the bugs relating to dialogue scenes, but you may need to work
with them if fixing the bug means re-structuring the scenes connected with
it, editing lines or writing new scenes. This is where the act of putting
comments into the scripts begins to pay off. You should know what each
section of dialogue is meant to represent and how it is supposed to work. For
instance, if you have been very thorough you may have put in comments to
remind you where conditions were set to trigger the scene - in which scene
the variable was set that the current scene is testing for.
Tr y to become part of the testing process yourself and play through the
game - or your part of it - with an eye for whether the story and dialogue
are working as they should. Care should be taken to play through it in as
many different ways as you can. If you find that you play through in the same
order each time, force yourself to take a different route. Does it still hang
together? Is it just as enjoyable?
