Having just watched the most recent Skywind video, I offer up my assistance for writing as needed!
I can offer up writing samples as required, or I'm more than happy to jump in and rewrite or polish as would be helpful. I've spent the last few years just doing writing in the themed and media entertainment industry, and clearly understand the need for variation and branching speech.
If I can help, please do let me know!
Awesome, we could use some idle banter lines for each character. Justafan will be heading the teams for writing these idle banter lines. And splitting people into areas to write for - I will be handling the Ashlander camps.
For a given area I would like new fitting dialogue written for character interactions with other characters in that same cell.
These short scenes should be no more than 4 lines long, including no more than 2 characters at once. these lines will be idly spoken at random intervals. The player may hear them in passing.
Humorous or serious, most important is that they add to the atmosphere. You will have to do research on your characters as you write their lines. Ideally we will have these lines ready to tack to the dialogue Taerkalith is planning before we begin recording for a given character, so our VAs can read them as part of the whole package of lines.
Hello nrugs4, nice to meet you!
At the moment, there's really no organizational structure to these idle banter lines, as we're waiting for our excel documents to get sorted out before we put everything together. Like Smite said, we're just making short exchanges between characters to make the NPCs seem more like real people than, well, normal NPCs. Ideally, every character in a given location (for instance, the Balmora Mages Guild) will have at least one piece of dialog to share with some other NPC, or even just muttering to themselves if it's appropriate.
For now, you can just put what you come up with on a Word document, and be ready to share it with us when our charts are sorted out.
Also, if you need inspiration, I have two recommendations:
- If you're willing to do a bit of digging in our forums, you should be able to find a thread titled "Scenes". That was basically the drawing board for authors who wanted to make longer dialogs that could play out between NPCs, and could be a good place to look for the kind of style we're looking for. Your lines will be shorter, but in general, they would follow a similar format. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Smite's Ashlander dialog is posted there, which makes for a great example.
- Secondly, the UESP wiki will undoubtedly be your best friend for this. If you don't know where to start, just go to the wiki, search for a location, and you should find you have more than enough information on various characters to get started. And if they don't have anything concrete about a certain NPC, don't be afraid to embellish them a little with traits of their own, within reason.
Great to have you on board! Don't hesitate to send me a private message if you have any questions!
I write stories sometimes (never published one, might sometime, though) and one of my favorite things to write is dialogue. I've spent the last year in a writing class, and also a class on keeping an audience interested, with different elements including speech.
Trust me, I hated the robotic long paragraphs in Morrowind, and I'm excited to help make the game better in that respect. When you need me, I'll be here.
Sorry for double comment, but I just had a thought. Is M'aiq the Liar going to be in Skywind, and if so, would you like me to write some dialogue for him relating to the Skywind project? I thought it would be cool to use his role as an easter egg in other Elder Scrolls games here. Just a thought.