I noticed that the scene I’m working on right now has reached 80 kilobytes in size. I’m thinking, huh, phone games are something like 20 MEGAbytes, how much text is 80 kb, really? So I copied it all from notepad++ into microsoft word and zoomed out.
30 pages in single spaced 12pt times new roman. Holy something, that’s more than all my school papers for the last year combined… It gave me a good feeling about how far I’ve come since starting this.
So I copied all my other scenes into Word. 115 pages. Admittedly, much of it is taken up by the double newline CS uses for paragraph breaks and by miscellaneous code, but still.
I wanted to post this as a possible motivational strategy for people who feel stuck or like they aren’t making any progress. I think you’ll be surprised if you do this.
@TheGuardian163 So the first chapter of my wip is around 10,000 words and that took me about a week to write, code, test and also make changes taking in to account the feedback given by people on this forum.
I don’t know how long it took @Crotale to produce 15–20,000 words but for me it depends. If you have planned what that chapter your writing will be about, then it shouldn’t take too long. To be honest, it’s the coding and then re-checking that code that takes the majority of your time. But do be aware, a number of late nights are inevitable.
That’s awesome! The last 3 days (5 but excluding the last 2) I spent 5-7 hours a day learning ChoiceScript and all the official tips and tutorials to writing a good game. Now I’m creating the main characters, doing main details of the main plot then I’ll be writing very short versions of vignettes
If I keep doing that which I will, progress will be extreme
I started this last September, but for the most part I haven’t been seriously working on it. I work in bursts, getting inspired and spending an afternoon on it and then going back to the rest of life, so I don’t have a good conversion to ‘x hours’ of work.
I’m not the most productive writer around here, but I first started the topic for my current WiP seven months and twelve days ago and I’m currently at 71217 words (or 243 pages in Word, using the same letter type and size @Crotale used)(I think that’s a bit under halfway through the whole thing)(with an a month long pause for the CScomp).
And contrary to @addicted I waste most time on writing, not coding, mainly because it’s a bit confusing with jumping from branch story to branch story, which tends to give me writer’s block. (I try to keep my code as simple as I can manage, that probably helps.)
You might try using a tool like Toggl to get an idea of your writing speed (time your work for a couple weeks, then count the words, then divide by time to get your words per hour.)
If you know how much time you’re willing to spend per week, and you know how long you want your project to be, and you know your writing speed, then you can get an idea of when you’ll finish!
I keep a word count (total written + code, not number of words read) to help me keep writing. Seeing the number increase on a daily basis is pretty motivational too I believe, since that’s a few thousand words taken towards finishing my work.
It’s a bit painful when I have to delete segments that don’t fit the rest of the narrative. I try to do it as little as possible, but sometimes it’s necessary to clean plot holes etc.
Yeah. I’ve deleted whole segments before and there was once I deleted two days worth of writing in order to restart a particular chapter but it was worth it.
