I am writing lots of dialog for a game I am working on. I was wondering if there was a program which can help me organize all this dialog and link conversations? Thank you for your help.

Visio?

Flow chart programs can be an easy way to organize story flow, choices and branching dialog, in story. You'll probably want to keep the text it self in a seperate word document.

here is an alternative to visio, a free Flowchart program:
http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/free_client.php

Thanks, both of you.

A personal wiki is often useful for things like this. TiddlyWiki, VoodooPad are a couple of examples.

I use a personal Wiki too, but i find it more useful to plan the overall game in, its not such a great way to organize dialog.

I remember from playing star control and later working on a clone that there are these things called Conversation Trees.

Try hunting around on the net for conversation trees, maybe try tying your search in with star control because I seem to recall someone developed a tool to build them with a gui and everything.

Hope that helps.

-edit

I did some looking around, ctree can be found at http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/contests/ctree.shtml

However now my memory is refreshed I believe it's more a toy and less applicable to serious development - sure you can create and explore conversation trees in realtime but I don't think it generates output that can be used easily in code.

I found a thread here: http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=8785
Where apparently yED, a program used to create graphs and flowcharts, has been used to output the data in some easily readable form, probably some XML variant. That might be worth looking into as well. It seems the procedure is to graph the nodes of the dialogue with the actual dialogue text, then use some kind of export script to output the structure into XML.

Anyway good luck.

IIRC, there was a poster here who actually used the Neverwinter Nights editor to create conversations and then used an utility to parse it and convert it to a format for his own game. The editor obviously comes with Neverwinter Nights, and the description of the file format is available freely at the NWN developer page.

If you're doing anything remotely complex with conversations -- like, in an RPG, checking for an item, giving quests, doing skill checks, etc -- you'd typically want to handle conversations with a scripted finite state machine and a string table.

But a flowchart is a perfectly workable tool for a content developer to communicate his intentions to a programmer (even if those are the same person).