My game has quite a bit of branching in it but there are sections where there would essentially be no difference and in those instances I use the same words I used on other branches. Does this count towards the word count? Like for example I have three separate ways the player arrives at a scene, now I describe the scene the same way each time but what will happen in the scene will be affected by how they arrived there. I just want to know if those copied sections will count towards the word count or not.
Why do you need three versions of the same text?
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Yes, everything but code is included in the word count. That said, this method of doing branching paths is generally considered bad practice, precisely because it inflates the word count. I try to minimize such repetition in my story by using *goto and *gosub commands and jump to the relevant paragraph(s) rather than just repeat it, whenever possible that is.
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I did as you suggested and merged the different scenes and used *goto to jump between the different parts. Hopefully it fits together. I’m still unsure when I would use *gosub, I know I can use it to stop my stats going above 100 but that’s it.
The only real benefit of *gosub is that it “remembers” when it was used, allowing you to jump back with a single *return command. It’s useful when you’re accessing one paragraph from multiple points in the story, but even I only used it once or twice, and it can be entirely replicated with other commands given enough stubbornness.
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