Progress Report 2022.11.14: Dialogue Loops & Dialogue Skeletons

Hi friends,

I hope you’re having a good November! It is very damp and chilly here, but the bright side is that I get to work from home with a blanket and warm tea. I had minor oral surgery a week and a half ago; I am recovering well and I’m mostly healed from it. Recovery didn’t affect my writing schedule too much (though I do question the quality of some of the things I wrote; that will be something to be fixed in the editing process).

Game Updates

Since I’m trying to get out of the habit of discussing the episode’s development by using the short hands I have in my notes, I’m going to layout the full structure so you have a better idea of what is being worked on and why Scene 1 is very content dense and why it is taking so long to develop.

Episode 3 Scene 1 covers the events of the morning directly after Episode 2 through to the MC arriving at Diradan Tower. It includes many very important conversations that lay the groundwork for future episodes, including more details about who, exactly, the MC is working for, Aeran’s history, and the MC’s feelings about the Wayfarer Order.

Currently, this is where Episode 3 Scene 1 stands:

EPISODE 3, SCENE 1
Branch 1 – Aeran Variations

This branch includes content for any situations where the MC and Aeran end Episode 2 in the apartment. This comprises of:

• Romance reconciliation
• Friendship reconciliation
• Breaking off your romance
• Breaking off your friendship
• Low romance variant

Each continuity has its own “morning scene” that takes place in the apartment, then a scene with Malsara, then a scene where the MC, Aeran and their party travel to Diradan Tower. This travel scene is split into two versions: one for where the MC remained hired and one for where the MC was fired.

• The hired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Aeran, Veyer, and Malsara.
• The fired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Aeran, Zenaida, and Malsara.

Finished: Morning scenes for all variations; hired version of the travelling scene
In-progress: Fired version of the travelling scene
Current Word Count: 160,296 (including my notes)

Branch 2 – Veyer Variation

This branch includes content for when the MC sleeps with Veyer at the end of Episode 2. Like the Aeran branches, this branch also contains a “morning scene” and a “travel scene”. The travel scene is split into two variations, one for the hired continuity, one for the fired continuity.

• The hired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Veyer, and Malsara.
• The fired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Veyer,  Zenaida, and Malsara.

Finished: Morning scene
In-progress: Fired travelling scene (needs major edits as some details have changed)
Not drafted: Hired travelling scene
Current Word Count: 33,841 

Branch 3 – Melchior & Kythera Variations

This branch includes content for any situations where the MC ended up at Melchior’s party at the end of Episode 2. This comprises of:

• Smoking dreamweed with Kythera
• Getting drunk (MC with Mel)
• Getting drunk (MC alone)
• Hanging out with Mel (friendship version)
• Sleeping with Mel

Like the other branches, there is a morning scene followed by a travel scene that is divided into two variants.

• The hired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Veyer, and Malsara.
• The fired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Zenaida, and Malsara.

Not Drafted: All the above
Current Word Count: 0

Branch 4 – Misc Continuities

This branch includes content for any situations where the MC ends the night in the apartment alone. This comprises of:

• Leaving Melchior’s party and returning to the apartment
• Returning to the apartment from the gallery after talking to Phaedra/Melchior/Veyer, but not having high enough approval with Aeran to unlock either reconciliation scene or enough romance to unlock the low romance variant
• Drunk route (MC was taken back to the apartment by palace staff)

Like the other branches, there is a morning scene followed by a travel scene that is divided into two variants.

• The hired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Veyer, and Malsara [will be merged with the variation from the Mel branch]
• The fired version includes a party makeup of the MC, Zenaida, and Malsara. [will be merged with the variation from the Mel branch]

Not Drafted: All the above
Current Word Count: 0

TOTAL EPISODE 3 WORD COUNT: 194,137 (including notes and copy/pasted + edited sections)

As you can see, there is still a lot of content to get through—however, there are also many repeat or structurally similar scenes. Regardless of what branch you’re on, you’re always going to have a morning scene and a travel scene—the party makeup and the kinds of conversations you can have are what changes. This is where dialogue loops and dialogue skeletons come in.

Regardless of what path you go down, there is specific information that must be delivered to the player by the time they reach a crucial bottleneck. For example, in Episode 1, regardless of whether you met Zenaida in the Docks or not, you always end up hearing her full proposition. This is an unchangeable story beat, because otherwise the story can’t happen.

Dialogue loops are sequences in an exposition-heavy scene. These are common in RPGs—walk up to an NPC, click on every question until you expire your dialogue options, and proceed from there. My version of dialogue loops are a little more complicated than that. It always bothers me when you’re progressing through a dialogue loop and the flow of questions don’t make sense. As a player, you end up ping-ponging around an NPC’s emotional state, with each question essentially existing in a vacuum. Oftentimes, you can skip the questions entirely and the quest will update as if you had asked them for all that additional info. This makes sense for most video games—it’s a QoL feature, letting you skip past the slow parts so you can be on your way.

However, this doesn’t work for Wayfarer. The game is solely text-based and has the pacing of a novel. The continuity of each choice needs to flow into the next. The game has an established rule that if you don't ask the question, your character never broached the topic. There's no quick exits here. 

This impacts dialogue loops in a major way because sometimes the information discovered in one question can affect the next. Furthermore, because the player can ask questions in any order (otherwise it wouldn’t be a loop and it would take away player agency), I need to track what information—or sometimes events, such as the passage of time or different scenery—they’ve encountered depending on what they have asked.

(As a side note, I highly encourage asking questions out of order! Think about what your player character should be prioritizing, since you never know when an NPC might decide they’ve had enough.)

Dialogue loops are among the most complex and difficult components I create for Wayfarer. The first instance of a dialogue loop is the most challenging to write, but once I have that skeleton down, I can move it around to different parts of the game and edit it to fit the different variations. For example, there is specific information the player can ask Zenaida during the travel scene. Though the questions and forthcoming information remain the same, the reactions to those questions change depending on whether Veyer, Aeran, or both are present (and also where your approval and/or romance sits with Aeran).

I never code while writing, but I do use colour-coded notes to do continuity and variation management.

Once I have a dialogue skeleton down, creating new content for a different variation becomes less about writing from scratch and more about taking existing material and editing it to fit a new branch. It’s very different work from normal writing, and it can be difficult to track what’s freshly written content vs copy/pasted content that’s been edited.

But shifting a dialogue skeleton around usually takes less time than writing something fresh. This is why I started with the Aeran branch—it has the most variations and small continuity differences. Doing this work first created the skeleton for almost every conversation the MC needs to have in the other branches, which makes it infinitely easier to write.

Currently, the completed sections of Scene 1 are with my editor. She’s going through a massive 90,000 word document right now to isolate the sections that either need to be cut or cleaned up. While she’s working on that, I’m finishing the rest of the Aeran branch. I was hoping to have it done by last Friday, but it will take a few more days of work to finish it off. After that, I need to edit the travel scene on Veyer’s branch and draft the hired variation of it. Melchior’s branch and the Misc branch will merge together sooner than the other branches as they share the same travel scenes. Their unique content hopefully won’t take too long to get through as Aeran isn’t present in the morning scene on either branch.

I hope this was a fun overview of my work process! We’re getting closer to an update, but I’m not in a place where I can properly estimate how long that will be. But what I can guarantee is that there will be a hefty amount of content to dig into, regardless of what path you are on.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. As always, thank you all so much for your support. 💕