Check out what one veteran has to say on Reddit.
As far as career goes, videogames aren’t great. On one project, I wrote about ten thousand lines of game chatter - as much dialogue as you’d find in maybe ten full-length screenplays. It’s a great exercise to learn to do this well, but I’d never want to do it again. Big budget projects are much fewer and far-between these days, while smaller projects have all the headaches plus some, and are far less rewarding to work on.
It’s honest, open and something well worth reading for anyone who thinks they’re geek enough to tackle it!
I’ve always used spreadsheets, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. The spreadsheets will have things like “100 lines of generic attack” dialogue, or “fifty lines of ‘I’m hit” dialogue. All of these lines will be called by the game engine, based on triggered events that happen within the game. And these triggers are the key to making some cool and fun in-game dialogue. If the triggers are generic and don’t convey much context, your writing is guaranteed to suck. I would highly, highly suggest that, as early as you can, you delve into these triggers, and figure out if there’s any way to load more context into them. (is the character outclassed? is he the last one alive? is he surrounded? is he out of ammo?) More context is always better.
Happy reading.