Article: ROM Hacking: Newbie Mistakes – Dialogue

[5qwerty]

In this article, I discuss the newbie mistakes that are made when writing dialogue for ROM hacks.

Check it out here!

 

[Zervais]

What a great article. Useful for hackers everywhere. I did not know about using different text colours for male/female, but I will definitely do this now and keep black for signs/gifts/ect.

Thanks for the advice, 5qwerty.

 

[Desert Stream~]

Thank you! This is so helpful :D

 

[Crizzle]

Good stuff. No, great stuff.

 

[Spherical Ice]

Worth noting that Text Adjuster does include \p, if you use a double newline.

 

[5qwerty]

Worth noting that Text Adjuster does include \p, if you use a double newline.

Derp. I thought I tried that. I guess I'll go change it now...

 

[Inky]

Great article. Dialogue is often the weakest part of hacks and fan games, so this is a great resource to have

 

[Aquacorde]

I like... don't hack or even play hacks... but this was a really interesting and informative read! Thank you!

 

[chrunch]

Thank you for making this. I so often see hacks using line breaks completely incorrectly, it really makes the dialogue look awful in my opinion. A proper explanation on how to use them was really needed.

 

[Deokishisu]

I take issue with your recommendation of blindly checking for the 34 character limit. Many hacks, (I believe even Gaia is guilty of this) seem to use the text adjuster and just let it sort out where their text falls in the textbox. The 34 character limit is just a guideline, and if you have a line with a lot of l's or i's or j's in it and use that limit, you'll be leaving space on the line which may make your text awkward. You even address this by starting at a 36 character limit and demonstrating that it doesn't work in all cases.

What I normally say is to try to avoid using \l like the plague. Game Freak uses it very sparingly, and tries to maximize the amount of characters they can get on a line of dialogue. You should try to do one complete thought per two-line textbox. Your line breaks and /p characters should try to come at natural pauses in the dialogue (as should \l, only use it during a natural pause if you need to use it). Test your dialogue in-game, and try to maximize the amount of characters that will fit in that particular line of dialogue, without going past the standard margin. A lot of the time, you may be able to fit another article or "skinny" four letter word on the end of a line which may keep you from having to use \l. The biggest issue with noob dialogue (if you take out the bad spelling, grammar, and capitalization) is the writing itself. The game delivers dialogue through the two-line textbox, and that fifteen-line run on sentence is not going to translate well. Break up your text so that it fits in the textbox. Reword stuff. Trim the fat. Even Game Freak did minor dialogue changes in Firered to fix the spacing in the wider GBA textbox. You can check this yourself.

Your paragraph about the character limit should be revised to show how many i's can fit in one line without going over (to emphasize the variance in maximum line length), and to advise noobs to test their dialogue to make sure that it's not awkwardly placed in the textbox. You can break the "limit" and make your text much easier to read with a little elbow grease.

But seriously guys, the text adjuster is the bane of my existence. Stop letting it drop your text in the box for you. It's lazy and obvious and makes your dialogue not flow. GB/C hackers get a pass because every character is 8x8 and they actually have a hard limit per line. Our characters vary in length, and our textbox is twice as wide. They can use the \l equivalent and not worry about text placement. We don't have that luxury.