Here’s something I do at the end of a Dialog project:
First I copy the source-code to a new file in Notepad++. Then I search/replace all the instances of escaped brackets with nothing. And then I use the following regular expressions to search/replace all the Dialog code with whitespace:
\([^)]+\)
^#.+$
%%.*$
That leaves me with just the text of the game (minus any substitutions and plus a lot of whitespace), which I paste into Word to run the spelling and grammar check. Because I’ve usually been working mostly without spellcheck until this point, often the results are rather embarrasing embarassing embarasing embarrassing!
Though Word doesn’t always acquit itself the best either…
Finally, I just sat down and played the whole thing, start to finish, trying to get up to mischief wherever I saw the possibility. As well as finding more mistakes in the text, missing synonyms and a misfiring flag, I also found a place where my rampage through the standard library had taken out a little too much:
Fortunately, this is why I use a local git repo. With a quick scroll through the commit where I deleted all that code from the library I could find the bit that I took out, and stuck it back in. Now we get the standard response to talking to the stranger, as we should.