Pacing dialogue
I’ve been thinking about how we pace dialogue in our games.
Originally, we didn’t have dialogue; we wrote prose — over a million words for Sorcery! and nearly the same again for 80 Days. There’s plenty of dialogue inside the prose, of course, but it’s written like you might find in a fast and readable book.
For Heaven’s Vault we decided to try a different approach: all the storytelling would be done by characters, in conversation, visibly on screen, like in a comic book. (We even introduced the italics on random words that comics just love to use. Too much fun.)
It took a while to learn to write this way! The pacing is completely different from prose — and it’s different from a film script, too. In a script, the writing is usually very short and functional (“You first”, “You okay?”, “Let’s go”) to leave maximum space for the actors — who are compelling and why we are there, generally speaking — to convey the meaning for us.
Additionally, when a scene requires a speech, we again rely on the power of a good actor to make anything rousing, devastating, and worth listening to. These run quite long.
But in a game — an inkle game, anyway — the text must, usually, stand entirely alone. There’s no actor to sell it, no facial fears or dewy tears, there isn’t even a sympathetic swell or fall in the music. If there’s character art, it’s from a limited pool and more often than not, at odds with the mood of the line. So the text needs to tell us everything: not just what’s being said, but also how we’re meant to feel, and also — crucially — how near the end of the current block of dialogue we are.
The rhythm we adopted is inspired by graphic novel writing, which is a broad campus with a lot of different styles, but generally it relies heavily on subtext, short lines spoken in a cascade rather than block speeches, and on the knowledge that a reader can go back over the dialogue if they didn’t get it first time.
So what does that look like in practice? It’s easiest to see by example. The following, for example, would play really well in an inkle-style game:
FRODO: I wish it need not have happened in my time.
GANDALF: So do I.
GANDALF: So do all who live to see such times.
GANDALF: But that is not for them to decide. All we to have to decide…
GANDALF: … is what to do with the time that is given us.
Gandalf’s speech is propulsive. The first line, the shortest, it reserved for the emotion: we understand his compassion. From there it expands on its theme, until the final line drops back, simpler and more profound than we expected, and the silence that follows gives us time to process it.
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By contrast, the following speech would not play so well:
GALADRIEL: Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen!
GALADRIEL: Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
GALADRIEL: Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth!
GALADRIEL: All shall love me and despair!
The line length is too repetitious. By bubble three we’re still not really getting anywhere, and it’s starting to feel like a list.
Better might be to go big, first, then buzz through the middle, and land the ending cleanly:
GALADRIEL: Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, as beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
GALADRIEL: Tempestuous as the sea…
GALADRIEL: Stronger than the foundations of the earth…
GALADRIEL: Yes!
GALADRIEL: All shall love me and despair!
The split sentences have momentum, while the additional “yes!” — gauche, perhaps, but it lands the thrust of what’s going through Galadriel’s mind even if we can’t see it. (And at least she doesn’t say “okay!”)
Note this all relies on one technical detail: we almost always design games that auto-continue their speech bubbles, at least, by default. If you have to click through, then five clicks for ten words a piece starts to feel pretty expensive.
If you want to see this kind of pacing in action, check out our recent game, Expelled! which is part of Humble Bundle’s complete inkle collection right now for less than a coffee and a cupcake.
