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Writing Foundry Episodes- How wordy is TOO wordy?
aleniskendra
Member Posts: 95 Arc User
Hi guys! I'm just looking for tips on writing dialog, without it being too wordy or boring.
I have a fairly developed storyline that I'm trying to use, one that is supposed to be like a continuation of DS9, but with new original characters. They will feature lots of Bajorans and Cardassians and I plan to do them as individual episodes that have a thread of continuity.
I LOVE Kirkfat's missions and how he incorporates a intriguing plot with plenty of action.
Any do's or don'ts? About how many sentences should be in a single dialog chain?
Also, what is the best way to incorporate options and choices, to make it a "choose your own adventure" style mission?
Thanks for any and all feedback!
I have a fairly developed storyline that I'm trying to use, one that is supposed to be like a continuation of DS9, but with new original characters. They will feature lots of Bajorans and Cardassians and I plan to do them as individual episodes that have a thread of continuity.
I LOVE Kirkfat's missions and how he incorporates a intriguing plot with plenty of action.
Any do's or don'ts? About how many sentences should be in a single dialog chain?
Also, what is the best way to incorporate options and choices, to make it a "choose your own adventure" style mission?
Thanks for any and all feedback!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
My very first Foundry Mission, Healing Old Wounds, has been completely reworked and rereleased!
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
Post edited by aleniskendra on
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Seriously, the goal of dialogue is first and foremost to give the player the most necessary infos he needs to play the game: Where am I? Where do I need to go? What do I need to do there?
Add to that one or two lines about the why and thats it.
Also, its my observation that most Foundry Authors dont understand the difference between Story and Exposition. You need story, but you do not want any more exposition than is absolutely necessary to enable the player to follow the story.
The story is: person X wants to kill person Y.
The exposition is: Person X was born on a planet with low gravity, where the clouds are hanging low and make the people rather depressed. Just recently a scientist named Oxelmox Bibelbrox has discovered a way to............. And thats how Person X met Person Y: It was a rainy day in November, when the Karabatte-Trees loose their Chicahuanna-Berries and the Gorumbanan-Bears come into the Chickatana Settlements to.....
NOBODY CARES!!!!!!!
As a rule of thumb: Every word you can get rid of is good riddance.
The rest of the players are generally supportive and cool about a well developed story; I'd say roughly 30-40% actually appreciate as much depth as you can bring to bear on your story, especially if the mission itself is more story than pew pew.
People in the mood to play it will love it. Some Joe trying to shoot fish in a barrel will not.
The other week I played a mission that had me spend nearly two thirds of the mission reading a short story through the dialogue box. Felt like he was trying to to a final fantasy style cutscene in text form.
R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy
My beef with really wordy missions is that I cannot get the text to a comfortable size in this game so a mission with many paragraphs of text will lose me. As an author I create foundry missions that are more story heavy than action but I compensate by building elaborate eye candy sets and adding fun game play mechanics.
I look forward to your series op. DS9 is my fave series and has lots to draw on. Oh if you want to see my little take on a 2409 Garak cameo try my mission.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
And even then, it might not work as you want. Personally, I write as similarly as I can to the authors I enjoy reading. I expect that most do the same, and herein lies the slippery slope, not everyone can read the same way you do, wants to read the same way you do, demands the same thing out of the written word that you do.
your choices then are to either write in the voice you want to write in, and let the chips fall where they may, or write in the voice that you feel will be the most palatable to the masses. In the end its entirely your choice on who you want to appreciate your missions then most.
I think part of the key to this is that dialog boxes are for DIALOGUE. If your story reads like a play and not a book, I think you are on the right track for what most of your audience will accept and have come to expect. If you find yourself writing a lot of exposition or speeches and not conversation, that's a time to do some re-work.
There's nothing stopping you from writing a novel, of course, just realize that your audience is likely to diminish if they don't feel like they are involved in what's going on.
The OP asked about options and choices. There's lots of ways to do it. With what you know will be a "wordy" story, branching dialogues are a good way to go. They let the player have some impact on the story and let you, as an author, get more creative.
I played through and reviewed a story last week ("Infinite Shift" by Intuitive_Aptitude) that did a spectacular job of providing the user with dialog box options. Perhaps 60% of his dialogues had three or more alternative responses for the player to make and all of them had unique follow-on dialogue. You don't have to go to that extreme, but I really appreciated it and am looking forward to replaying the mission just to see some of the alternative choices played out.
You can also provide choice through interactive objects. KirkPhat has a bunch of videos related to object interaction and triggers over on StarbaseUGC.
Remember my saying "The Foundry is the author's sandbox, not the player's."
That said, my guiding when doing my own missions is "make it like an episode of Star Trek." Sometimes you're gonna need a lot of talking, sometimes not. Give the story exactly as much dialogue as it needs.
I fully agree with the sentiment behind that statement, but I think we need to be careful with it since it can breed a level of arrogance that I believe we need to keep in check. Yes, do anything you want in your sandbox while the mission is in development and just for you. BUT...
As an author, I believe you have some responsibilities when bringing your creation out of the sandbox and placing it before the general public:
There's a guy on here right now who no one will respond to. He's advertising his mission with a video presenting walls of text that are mis-spelled and grammatically unparseable. And yet he has the arrogance to lock comments and say in the video description "I don't care if you don't like my spelling."
This is one place where the sandbox metaphor breaks down.
Respect also means you don't do things that are intentionally annoying in a mission. Running the player back and forth between two or three locations multiple times is annoying. Map after map with one line of dialog and a scan task is annoying.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
As a player I also allways apreciate to have the dialog-options, that will advance the mission, be marked in green. Since I am not a foundry author, I dont know wether authors have the option to mark the mission relevant dialog options.
Another thing I realized when playing Foundry Missions: Most Authors forget the rule of "Show! Dont Tell!"
Dont tell me, that Person X is a scientist, who studies warp field bubble singularities, that can open a time rippling space vortex through the tachion harmonic subfrequencies of the hyperspace matrix, but if the tachyonic wavelength is slightly off ballance by a nanofraction of the Rubens Spectrum it will open a transwarp tunnel into a subuniverse and allow creatures from there to infiltrate our universe and those creatures are known to be cerebrivore.
Show me a guy in a white lab coat, standing in a labarotary, shouting out "No! The Frequencies are all wrong!" Then show me an exploding console. Show me a glowing light. And then show me the Zombies storm into the room.
Thats all I need.
Alas, we do not. Cryptic usually also makes the mission-advancing dialog the last one in the list, so that's what I generally do as well.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
Break Text Up: Apply paragraph breaks within the text. It makes it visually easier for the reader to know how progress. Also try to keep the text in a single box related and not overloaded.
Provide Options: Sometimes people want to get into the details and sometimes people want to get to just the "Tell me what I have to do now." Have optional paths in dialogue that allows the curious players to explore and gives players who don't an option to continue on. A skip, or "summary", option should be considered.
Be Aware: There is no such thing as the "perfect" foundry mission, it comes down to preferences. Take feedback but critically evaluate it. As a foundry author you are the one that determines what gets put in and what doesn't however if a player has an idea that could improve the mission then it should get decent consideration.
It's not about arrogance. It's about the fact that your Foundry mission is your Foundry mission. It belongs to you, not to the player (well technically it belongs to Cryptic) and you have the right to do with it what you want and create it how you want and I don't believe you should surrender that right.
If all you care about is plays than by all means cater to the lowest common denominator of players. Hell, if all you want is to maximize plays, make a grinder, very little writing necessary. But not everyone thinks like that. People have a vision for their own story that they want to tell and I don't think they HAVE to compromise it just to get plays. They can if they choose to, that's fine, but they don't have to.
Do all Foundry authors have to create something for masses? No, not at all. If some choose to, that's great. But there is an audience out there for every Foundry mission, no matter what way it is written or built.
The only "rules" for creating Foundry missions are in the EULA. Everything else is up for grabs.
What I am saying is that when you publish and advertise your mission as something that people should spend their precious free time on, it should be polished and worthy of their time.
I'm also saying that, as authors, we need to recognize that we can be wrong. When we stop acknowledging that, we have become arrogant and don't deserve to have our missions played. That may be a bitter pill for some to swallow, but it's reality.
You are welcome to disagree with me. This is advice I'm giving. But after reading this advice, I would hope that you wouldn't insist you can still do anything you damn well please in the Foundry and then expect people to like it and not speak up when things don't work or aren't enjoyable.
Yes I believe authors can and should do anything they want in the Foundry and yes they can expect some people to like it. For some missions it will be harder to find that audience. Also, no matter what you do some people will also dislike it. That's the price we pay in any creative endeavor. Go find the highest rated mission in the whole Foundry and I guarantee there will be someone giving it a one-star and calling it TRIBBLE.
I also advise people to make sure things are as polished as they can be before they publish, who wouldn't? But the Foundry is not a professional thing. We are all amateurs here.
My point boils down to the fact that I'm tired of seeing people metaphorically TRIBBLE in public with their missions while you wish to encourage it. Neither will convince the other.
Let those on the sidelines take from it what they will.
This though, gets you into a catch 22, especially given the state of the search system right now. Not everyone is an english major, and all have a varying level of ability with writing/plotting/developing. The Foundry is a non professional conduit for people to try their hand at writing. With this in consideration it is more than a little difficult for people to present a polished, ready for primetime piece, especially if given the previous statements I have made are true.
NOW with that said, on the topic of criticism, I agree that every author should be open to it, but then on its own you do have to draw a line sometimes between trying to create the best work you can, and someone focusing on the minutiae despite the grand scheme of things. The way I have always looked at things, is this is about growth, trying to better yourself. If we can't leave room for any improvement, then what are we even doing watching things like Star Trek in the first place?
Writing rule #1: K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid)
That doesn't mean that you can't add complexity, but your dialog trees should be direct and clear at all times. The player should feel like they're being spoken with and not spoken at. Basically, the info-dump was the worst feature of late 90s Star Trek and should be kept to a minimum in your mission.
Regardless, I look forward to playing whatever you wind up with.
Greetings Aleniskendra,
Sound's like you have quite the plot planned out. I wanted to pop in and attempt to answer your question. There are no hard and fast rules as to how much dialog is too much, but here are several tips I can offer.
Dialog, like any other aspect of a Foundry mission has a flow. And nailing down that flow is (for me) the key to keeping dialog from bogging down. In this way, how things are being said are far more important than how much is being said. The best way I'v found to figure out the flow of dialog is to read the dialog out loud. If you can get through saying the dialog without it sounding off to you, then you're probably on the right track.
While this isn't the only way to do it, I've also found it easier to break down larger chunks of exposition by making it more conversational. I'll often look to the Trek shows for inspiration, specifically the conference room scenes (every trek show had some version this) where the characters would discuss the solution to whatever problem they faced. It helps to look and see how the Trek writers handled exposition (which Trek has no shortage of.) Sometimes I'll even mentally picture a scene I'm writing playing out in the conference room on TNG.
Also, don't be afraid to go through your dialog several times. I know my writing often get's rewritten several times before it's done. I know some professional authors will make a pass through to trim any extraneous dialog that isn't supporting the point of the conversation.
My last piece of advice, and this is more a general Foundry advice, is make the mission YOU want to play. Don't worry about pleasing the general audience because a) this early in, it's just going to be a distraction, and b) chasing after the affection of the populace is a fleeting goal. You first goal should be to please YOU. If YOU like it, there's a much better chance others might.
Alright, I think I've talked your ear off enough now. I look forward to seeing what you come up with and welcome to the Foundry.
EDIT: As to options and choice, it's a great way to give the mission a more personal feel as you can tailor dialog to different characters. How you use it is really up to you.
I think its always important to have exposition and explinations of details, I find it very boring myself when nobody will tell me whats going on in detail , i'm suposed to be a captain , i need answers before i decide what to do don't i? ( i am also a big fan of the random NPCs having as few lines of dialogue , why are so many missions full of people who ignore me?)
But i totally understand that others may not wish to read loads and loads, so give them a shortcut route, Clearly marked so they can just get to the Pew Pew Pew they want to do
I would totally agree with the don't tell, show method, BUT the foundry is rather limiting in places, meaning we have to tell people what they are seeing at times
Like with anything else, based on the reviews some folks loved it, others didn't. So, like dragoon said above me, make the mission the way you want, and just flag the mission in the Foundry description as dialog and story heavy, and maybe note whether you've done something weird like I did (I went back and revised the mission this past week, and noted the mission's quirks in the description).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
I wouldn't use "wrong" in this context but an author is hardly infallible either. An author needs to be open to feedback so that their mission can improve but on the other hand not all feedback is helpful. A player might provide feedback that goes contrary to the creative vision that the author has.
Such feedback is debatable whether it improves the mission or not. By following it you may improve something but at the cost of something else. I'm not saying people that follow this path is wrong, just that it's far more shades of grey than might initially seem.
As has been said many times, an author of foundry has to author and create stories and other things for themselves because there is simply no other reason to create in the foundry but on the other hand the foundry becomes alive through the players that play it.
Basically there has to be a balance between Author and Player. The author should not be the be all and end all, but neither should the player.
I want to see innovation. I want to see different approaches to storytelling and combat. Nothing I've written here has dictated "you must follow this formula", though by people's reactions you would think I had. The strongest thing I've said in that regard is that I think missions work best when they read like a play instead of a book. And that was a suggestion.
The only "shoulds" I've put out there are that you should respect the players if you are going to publish your mission and advertise it for public play. It sounds like a reasonable premise to me, but perhaps it doesn't sound so reasonable to others.
I play a LOT of Foundry missions -- a whole lot more than you see me review here. And I find that a sizable percentage play like the author forgot there was somebody on the other end of the screen. The player was not respected or considered. The author did what he felt he needed to do to assuage his own ego and get his creativity expressed -- and that's fine. But he didn't do so in a way that I could celebrate that creativity with him. I keep using this term because it is so apropos: it's mission masturbation. The author is having fun while I watch uncomfortably from a distance. Consider me, the player, so that I can have fun too -- and not feel so awkward.
That's the middle ground I seek -- a place where the player is able to enjoy being a part of the author's brainchild.
And that's my advice to the OP. Make a story that titillates your interest and then polish it so that others can celebrate it with you.
Is everyone going to like it -- probably not. But don't put or leave impediments in the way that push your players away.
I definately agree with that as part of creativity is taking people along for the ride. I don't think Drogyn would disagree either but I think the friction there were the different ways that you guys approached the word "wrong". It was interpreted in a way that it wasn't intended to be and applied to be people that it wasn't intended to be applied to.
Which is why I shied away from it as it can be a strong word.
On the other foot, I don't think Drogyn is advocating what you think he is advocating either. Merely the final responsibility and decision for what to do is the author's. It's the author that has to put everything in and subsuming the Author's will to that of the player can be just as bad.
Everyone's pretty much has the same opinion just approaching it as trying to "defend" the middle ground from perceived attacks from either side.
I didn't think Drogyn was advocating anything anti-player either -- until he railed at what I felt was a reasonable caution regarding his sandbox quote. I repeat: I appreciate the sandbox metaphor -- but in the wrong or immature hands that statement becomes a license to do whatever you please and who cares if you are wasting people's time or making them miserable as a result. Go back and read my original statement -- it was a caution against running to the side of author arrogance with the metaphor.
And by the way, don't think for a moment that people don't go there. I've seen people write on these very forums things like "I only write missions for myself these days because of all the bad feedback I get." Or "Foundry search is so bad that it's not worth my time to polish my mission." Heck, something like that last statement was almost said in this very thread! Those are, in my opinion, excuses for either being lazy or not wanting to deal with the fact that not everyone thinks the author is brilliant.
Sorry... I really don't mean to rant, but it's become a hot button for me because I'm seeing so much chatter that seems to endorse making mediocre missions -- and then making more of the same rather than making the existing ones better. And I've sat on the sidelines saying nothing, trying to be diplomatic when I just want to scream "why are you advocating that bad mission writing is okay?"
I honestly don't want to argue. I just want to see people encouraging each other to make good missions -- and then make those good missions better. Telling a new author "whatever you do will be fine" when he's actually asking for help on how to make the best mission he can doesn't work toward that end.
I've hijacked the OP's post in the process and I apologize for that. But I hope it's been relevant and that he is able to make use of what each of us have contributed here.
The key to take away is Balance. There is always a balance between length, telling, showing, acting to involve players. If you remember your main character is in truth the player, more often then not you will do well when you take a step back and look at things.
Choice comes into play with that illusion of what the game provides, but I find it also is a way to sneak in your aspects you can't really show or want to go into more. I tend to put a lot of choices in there for people to avoid or cut through dialog which they are not interested in. It is but one way.
Do what it takes to keep their entertainment needs slated while telling your story. Find the balance, tweak with it, and never be afraid to go back.
I wish authors would follow this simple rule. Even if the button, that will give me the next chunk of text, is only called <Continue>, its still better than walls of text.
For instance, take the scene from TWOK, when Khan introduces himself:
"Kirk, my old friend! Do you remember me?"
Klick <How could I forgett!>
"I cant help but feel touched. I sure remember... You!"
Klick <Whats the meaning of this attack?>
"Didnt I make my intents clear? I will have my revenge!"
This kind of dialogue can go on for quite some time, without getting boring. That is, if every line of dialogue builds up into the next part of the mission, the next task, the next battle..... otherwise it feels pointless.
this is good advice i think, Keeps a flow of conversation going and prevents excessive monologuing from occuring
also it might be nice to have .......... as a button so you can just let the character keep talking , and have a button to interrupt if you want , so if you want to hear a villain monologue for 10 mins for comic effect you can or you can intrerrupt him after his first line, players choice
This! I actually try to write like I am writing a comic book.I need to do this since I can be a wordy person. Look at a movie like the original Star wars or the original King Kong. No word is in there by accident and some of the dialogue is joyfully stripped down (My name is Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you!).
Essentially if you are going to have the player read a wall of text make sure there is a reward for doing so. An exampe: I played Contamination by evil 70th. His mission is wordy but has an option to skip to a summary. Also the dialogue is colored with humor so is not too painful to read. Finally he innovated with the game play giving the player stealth game play options that were fun. I always try to have a big pay off in my missions whether it be some cool map or foundry trick or a big emotional pay off in the story.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.