Writing for games is specialized and linked to gameplay style, genre and technology. I’m playing an FPS (will remain nameless) where some of the walking around dialogue is eye roll inducing and some of the combat dialogue is even worse.

There just something... off about the combat dialogue and response to events. It’s the timing, it’s what they say, it’s which lines get a response from an NPC and which don’t...

Combat dialogue is like an elaborate symphony with many different voices and “instruments” involved.

On Full Spectrum Warrior, combat dialogue was very important to me because, in your role as the squad leader, you needed to place an absolute value and priority on the lives of the soldiers in your command. It was game over if a single soldier died.

I worked with the AI engineer to create an event-driven dialogue system. It was complex, involving delays, weighting, queuing, and linked lines. It also included emotion and situation, so the way a soldier said even something as simple as “Taking fire” varied based on stress.

That complexity meant when a soldier was wounded, other soldiers included his name when they called it out. At any point in the game, up to two soldiers could be unconscious and carried by the squad. In-game cutscenes flowed around that, with other soldiers taking their lines.

Now that I had the system, I had to figure out how to write for it. I had an Excel spreadsheet that specified the character, the event, then line variants for each stress level. That meant defining all the game events the system would recognize and how each soldier would respond.

At that point, three of us started writing. I think we had a total of 26,000 lines, maybe more. We added a system to show the event name and line text so we could test the system, then recorded team members for all of the lines to test the timing and flow, then make changes.

Naming standards were one of the most important things the audio director and I did! Because we had those strict naming standards for events and file names, all 26,000 lines of dialogue came in with under 100 bugs. Otherwise it could have been a nightmare.