Chris Avellone: I wrote a first draft and character briefs of most of the characters in the game (I’d say 75%, a sample of one of these dialogue briefs is attached - Ravel_First_Draft.doc), and then designers for individual areas would script and revise them, taking them to something along the lines of Ravel_Final.doc. Probably a poor example, since I wrote Ravel from start to the finished template, but it should give you a sense of scope, and taking it from first draft to final copy was no small task.
I probably did the most writing, but Colin, Warner, Maldonado, Bokkes, Jason Suinn, Deiley, and others all made original characters as well as revising the suggested ones. Suinn, for example, did a lot of the core work for the Alley of Dangerous Angles and a number of original characters (and item descriptions), and Warner and Colin hammered away at Curst. In general, each designer took a portion of the game and fleshed it out.
Note that while we wrote these dialogues in Word, we had a clunky process for getting them into the editor and testing them – we had several tech designers (Presnell, Hendee, Derek Johnson, and Dave Maldonado) who actually helped get the frameworks into the game and inputed them directly into the editor. Maldonado had the horrid task of getting Fell’s dialogue into the game, which was a huge pain because it technically was three dialogues in one (and huge ones) depending on who was translating for the player.
Since then, we've tried to use batch files and importation processes for entering dialogues into game editors, and when possible, we try to write dialogues directly in the editor (NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer).
Colin McComb: I hate to say it again, but Chris did the major work on the game. I would estimate that although he had seven designers on his team, he did about 50% of the work on the project. Keep in mind that he did all this while he was working on Fallout 2 as well. The man is truly prolific.
http://swfup.com/view/hpe5
