Dialogue Formatting Style

[kuwert]

Hey guys, I'm working on my own re-scripting of the game that'll mainly be dumping the GBA script into the game with slight modifications to suit my personal opinion (I'm very aware there's a bunch of these out there already, woohoo...)

I'm on the fence on how I want to display dialogue in the game without the modern conveniences of things like different text color, a dedicated "speaker name" box, etc. I removed the ALL CAPS names, but it makes the speaker name blend in too much sometimes. So here's 4 options:



Option A is basically unformatted while the others range from bunch of different examples I've seen (B is Chrono Trigger style, D is FF7-ish style). Obviously some of these involve a bunch of extra characters to format the text, which is inconvenient, but I can deal with it if the result is nice. I'm personally leaning towards B but that one is annoying to implement.

I searched but didn't see any discussion on this particular issue   What's everyone think?

[Gi Nattak]

Hello there and welcome!

I like C the best, but I'd imagine any besides A and probably B might result in some of the larger dialog text be edited down, or continuing it on with another box, due it bleeding over, and that doesn't look all that good imo when it does that. Just my 2 cents anyway.

[kuwert]

Hello there and welcome!

I like C the best, but I'd imagine any besides A and probably B might result in some of the larger dialog text be edited down, or continuing it on with another box, due it bleeding over, and that doesn't look all that good imo when it does that. Just my 2 cents anyway.

Yeah, I ran into this issue. Rather than just have the text flow into the next box, I cut it at the end of the nearest sentence, and started the next dialogue box with the speaker name at the top again. Of course there's plenty of room in the expanded script bank to do this.

[madsiur]

C and D are cool. I'd stay away from B though.

[Lockirby2]

I voted for A. Maybe it's a boring choice, but I think B looks weird, and I think removing ~25% of the text in a text box will make the text more fragmented. Maybe it's just that I'm used to seeing the text that way though.

[Turbotastic]

I picked B. A is too close to the original game, while C and D force you to lose a line in the text box for no good reason.

B seems more like a script, and the indenting gives the dialogue a nice touch.