Writing Interesting Characters (part 1)

Yes, I'm obviously a gamer, and from the many Solar Echoes books I've released (and frequent social media posts) you've probably also gathered that I'm an avid writer. In addition to my hopes of becoming a novelist someday, I'd also be very open to writing for video games—specifically RPG's. Video game companies are hiring experienced writers to craft the stories for their games, and RPG's have become a very popular genre. Their success is due, in part, to the epic stories and interesting characters that the game is based upon. Back in 2002 when the D&D RPG game “Neverwinter Nights” released, I remember spending untold amounts of time designing my own adventures. I enjoyed designing the settings, the challenges, and even scripting (coding) a few unique features, but the best part was writing the dialogue trees for the characters. Writing conversation options and responses for each character involved complex branching conversation trees, assigning tags for choices that would open or close other dialogue options. As I did all this, it also developed my own writing style, because it got me thinking about how the personalities of each character could be reflected in their choice of words and the responses they would more likely give in each situation. I still consider some of the same things when writing characters...