UPDATE:
Haven't been making leaps and bounds lately. I'm writing quests and dialog on my lunch breaks at work and trying to implement them when I have time at home. Lately the biggest thing I've done is perfected my dialog system.
I intend to have a large amount of dialog in the game. I wondered how I could do this without spending forever creating dialog for each NPC and programming facesets, etc. I also wanted to keep dialog very expandable without having to edit a bunch of sprites with every expansion. Obviously I needed to use some common events. To get past the problem of facesets I simply used the "You" and "Them" images that slide in/out from the sides of the screen so you know which character is talking. Simple but it works. An example of how some of the dialog works...
If you've ever played Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, you know that there is a list of dialog options to the right of the character. Some of this is common dialog such as Morrowind Lore or Rumors. If you picked one of these options you would be randomly selected dialog from a single source on that topic. I use this same concept in game, modified.
There are three types of common dialog: Rumors, Things of Interest, Lore
Instead of simply putting the options: Rumors, Things of Interest and Lore, I might phrase it something like this:
"Hi whats your name?" and "What do you do?" are asking about the NPC and are event specific responses.
"Any rumors floating around?" Is obvious. It might also read something like, "Whats the good word?" or "Anything happening around here?"
"You came by ship..." Leading into a conversation. This particular NPC responds by talking a bit about his travels and then pulls up the Lore common event for some random information.
"Whats on your mind?" Pulls up the Things of Interest common event.
These common events are built specifically for each city. The above dialog is for Al'Norvin. There would be completely different discussions in Secron, Evony City, Aeschylus, Veles, so on and so forth. Not every NPC pulls up common dialog and sometimes you don't realize that its even common dialog as there is so much diversity to it (which is the point). The options for dialog are specific to the NPC event. So we can talk about the NPC, specific quest, specific dialog, common dialog, bartering, etc.
With this system I can also have quests start by random chance of talking to the right person at the right time. You could be talking to some useless NPC about the rumors or things of interest and bam, you have a quest. The quest continues without being repeated. I can even be specific to a group, such as city guards. One guard could randomly tell you that they are looking for a bandit leader, you could offer to find him, and then later while you are talking to another guard he might ask you how the hunt for the bandit leader is going. Then once you catch the bandit leader a guard might ask you if you were the guy that caught the bandit leader or tell you what a great job you did. This can be expanded as much or as little as needed in the future. You can even be the rumor. Perhaps you did something epic for The Queen. People might start saying, "Hey, arent you that guy that did that thing?"
You might notice that what's is spelled whats. In this game ' is specific to the dialect.
It wouldn't be Al'Norvin's, it's simply Al'Norvins. In Luna "Al" is a holy word. It can reflect a couple meanings such as "Great" or "Holy," depending on its usage. Al'Norvin is somewhat like Great 'Norvin where Al'Atra (the Goddess) is Holy 'Atra.
I have not quite decided how ' should be pronounced.
Well enough of this, I have some characters to implement...
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