A bark is a line a character says without you asking. Get them right and the world feels populated. Get them wrong and you have shipped a game where eleven factions all say the same four things and a player notices in ninety minutes.
Iron Monsoon has 4,200 of them across eleven factions, keyed to relationship state, faction identity, weather and what you did in the last two hours. The writing is the easy half. The hard half is the audit.
The audit is a script that plays ten thousand simulated sessions and records which lines fired, in what order and how often. What it surfaces is not the lines you overwrote, it is the states you underwrote: the combination of hostile faction, heavy rain and a recent betrayal that only has three lines in it because nobody thought about that corner when the spreadsheet was being filled.
We ran it weekly. The number I care about is not total line count, it is the worst-case state: the least-populated combination a real player can reach. We shipped with a floor of eleven lines in any reachable state, up from three when the audit first ran, and that number did more for how the world feels than the last thousand lines we wrote.
