I have to be careful with my labeling and naming, because I will confuse myself later on, if I am not careful.
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Always a concern! I do try to keep track of them in a separate file, but I usually don’t need to. Something about the silly names just sticks in my brain.
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I tend to think better with pen and paper. Is that inefficient when writing an IF?
If anything it’s more efficient, if you break or otherwise injure your non-dominant hand you can still write but it would be difficult to type.
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I think it’s better for writing in general, in many aspects. The ease with which you can edit/delete text on a computer makes it easy to fall into a trap where you’re spending all your time spinning your wheels over the same sentence/paragraph, making small changes and then undoing them over and over. Just wasting a lot of time trying to polish part of an unfinished first draft, which is a great way to ensure that it stays unfinished.
You can’t do that as easily when writing by hand, so I find it’s easier to just get a draft out on pen and paper.
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I don’t know how people do it.
I keep reading new WIPs, and their demos are stated to be 20k or 30k long, but if I were to write that exact same plot, with the same amount of branching, and optional text, it would be <5k words.
I’m very aware that my own writing tend to be rather concise and bare-bones, but even when I actively try to pad things and write as wordily as I can, I don’t seem to get the same amounts of words that most other people use as standard.
When I was still away from home for hours most days, I used to write my code down with pen on paper, and then bring it home and type it all in.
It worked fine for me, and there was something satisfying about filling sheets of paper with code, especially when writing with a red pen, for some reason.
I think there’s something about writing by hand engaging a different part of the brain, or something?
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Some writers just are wordier than others. I seem to be unable to shake the habit of writing way too long sentences.
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Word count is a fickle statistic that often can be several values at the same time.
I can write the same chapter word for word when read, and have it either come out to be 10,000 words or 20,000 words written. How, you ask? The different use of coding.
Besides that, many cultures use more “purple prose” than others and what seems “dry and lifeless” to some may be “just right” and visa versa.
In my experience, there is no real value you can slap on a person’s IF writing that is measured by word count alone.
Each of us has quirks and foibles when we write, and there is no “one way” of doing so.
I used to write in a program called Scrivener, a powerful writer-specific program, but as time went on my habits have changed. Now I write my IF in an IDE environment, and have many reasons for doing so, but none of them are “must use” reasons.
If you have not yet checked out CSIDE IDE, I would recommend doing so. It may or may not be the correct tool for you, but you won’t really know without exploring it. It has a tutorial in it if needed as well.
You are not alone! Even after working on my Patchwerks project for over a year, I still feel it is a huge undertaking. I am sure others who participate in the support threads will tell you the same thing.
Have you read the article I linked above (in the first post) … I think you would find it very useful.
This is all about writing consistently, and knowing how to pace yourself in a long-term project like an IF.
There are other helpful articles available if you desire to read things to help you succeed.
And I think you made a big step forward by making your post in this thread!
. 
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That’s true.
Back in the days, when I did a lot more code-diving of WIPs, I do remember seeing people repeating pretty big chunks of text multiple times, for only minor changes.
That will pad the word count significantly as opposed to more ‘efficient’ coding and use of multireplace.
Please teach me the verbose ways. I find it much easier to cut words and make things more efficient, than to add embellishments.
I have often thought of teaming up with another writer, who writes more words. then they could focus on writing, and I could focus more on coding, outlining, and editing, and we could support each other.
But it hasn’t worked out the times I tried, and I don’t have the health and energy to try anymore.
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My interest is so fickle, recently.
Now I kinda want to abandon my new project, and instead adapt a piece of classic gothic literature, or an old fairytale, into an erotic IF.
The muses are mercurial creatures, and I am still scatterbrained from having covid.
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I will not. Firstly, I’m not verbose per se - I could totally use more words - I just write way too long and complex sentences (while the wordcount total still stays too low to my liking) which I then need to actively edit and simplify. It’s a flaw, not a benefit, at least if my professor is to be believed. (Which, in case of my Master’s, kinda is.)
Writing tired sometimes increases my verboseness though? I turn kinda rambly then.
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You can also try to write unique texts depending on previous variables in their entirety, not as *if whatever=whenever. This seems to work wonders for word count and lagginess of your IDE or Google Document.
I still can’t understand why mine is so bloody laggy. I have more than enough resources for running Google Docs.
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Sure, but I prefer to get the single-playthrough-length wordcount as a baseline, and that naturally doesn’t have variants (or code, for that matter).
(Unless I misunderstood something you said, which is possible, since I just woke up from a nap and didn’t bother to put my glasses on.)
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I’ve meant it kinda-sorta like this…
You can do variations either like that:
*if whatever=whenever
words words words words
*if whatever=not_whenever
words words words
Or like that:
*if whatever=whenever
*goto whenever_label
*if whatever=not_whenever
*goto not_whenever
*label whenever_label
words words words
*label *not_whenever
words words words
It seems the latter is more useful for padding out a wordcount.
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That does sound pretty frustrating.
And yeah, I have noticed that the rare times I’m gotten a lot written in a short time, was between 2am and 4am, on nights where I couldn’t sleep.
It’s like a specific state of tiredness makes the internal editor actually switch off.
Some ways I have noticed that other people seems to get more prose into their plot:
- Descriptions. Long ones.
- Lore dumps, either in the beginning of a scene, or formatted as being able to ask some character a bunch of questions, that each have a long detailed answer.
- Long stretches of other characters doing stuff, without much input from the PC.
I think it’s more difficult to notice a lot of text passing by, when the author manages to make it feel engaging and well-paced.
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Question: how do people find average playthrough wordcounts? Right now my WIP has a ton of variable-dependent dialogue, which is definitely inflating my CSIDE wordcount beyond what an average player will see. Is it just a matter of playing through a path and manually counting?
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Ah, I see now (well, or not. Still without my glasses). But that means my point stands - coding efficiency matters only when you have code.
(I’d personally use goto if the same chunk of text repeats, and not use goto if it doesn’t.)
Right, that’s the one I meant. I call it as the logical part of my brain being asleep (so the creative part takes over). Not viable on long term, sadly.
None of which sound worth emulating to me (especially if it doesn’t come naturally), unless you’re not writing IF, in which case the last one is fine.
I mean, I do it by writing a single playthrough first.
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If you run RandomTest and choose the “show full text” option, it’ll display the total amount of text generated. Divide that number by the number of times you’ve run the test to get an average.
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I’ve been having trouble with that for a while and just get a blank screen if I tick full text. (It’s actually kind of annoying for bugtesting as well as not being able to get a feel for playthrough length.) Is it still working for everyone else? I thought it was just my computer, but was doing the same thing on another I tried also.
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I started having trouble with that a while back, I think it was around when we started having to “upload” the files in order to get the browser to run it. I do it though the run-randomtest file and get it to put the output into randomtest-output.txt when dealing with a particularly nasty bug or difficulty balancing.
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I also found if you click “automatically scroll to the bottom” it will complete the test and then you can manually scroll through the text, once the test is done.
Ultimately, exporting the text to a .txt file (as suggested by Hannah) is the most workable thing for editing/reviewing and balancing.
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