Coding getting fancier really translates to being more efficient. So games nowadays have much less copy and pasting than they did before, so their word counts are in fact more accurate.
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I credit multireplace, and all the editors being far more demanding about how clean code is. For myself I think once writers get a good sense of how to code efficiently it just makes writing the game easier!
But also, there’s professional pride for me at stake. In addition to the regular edits the lead editor does by milestone, we do two full draft reviews when the game is complete: one with the lead editor, and one with another editor on the team. For me, I’m embarrassed not to send extremely clean and efficient code to my colleagues. I know @HarrisPS has spoken to the fact that I drill pretty hard on it. Of course, sometimes things are set up in such a way that you can’t easily avoid repeating and for “safety’s” sake it’s better to repeat than to mess up a playthrough with a series of *gosubs that are too complex to be sure they’re working right every time.
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I think the appearance of ‘long’ and ‘short’ games is affected not just by word length, but by the reader’s perception and engagement with the story.
This should be a concern and a big one.
If games are getting longer and longer, - see charts below - then they should be priced at lengths that compensate the author for spending that much more time creating a larger story.
This obviously begs the question, should we compare IFs to novels - namely their pricing procedures - or should we adopt a different pricing standard because IFs should be held separately from novels?
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I mean, I just did a google on how much an ebook is, and it said $4 (e.g. roughly in line with our pricing), but IDK how that breaks down once you start factoring length more.
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What is that chart? Where is it from?
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Oh btw, @MaraJade, I actually strongly disagree that splitting a complete work into a series is amoral, because the alternative would practically be writing most of the work for free.
For example:
Let’s say someone wrote a 900k game and decided to split it up into 3 games of 300k each, all priced at $6. This makes a lot of sense to me because if the game was sold in just one big app at 900k, it would only be priced at like $8. So, yes, you’d get a bit more sales and a bit more money per sale if you sold it as one big installment, but not nearly enough to compensate for that extra 600k words. So it would be like giving a huge portion of that content away for free.
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The question I always have is, do the individual works all have their own conclusions of a sort. Yes, they may be cliffhangers, or other things strongly prompting you to continue on, but each work should have some kind of conclusion, some kind of arc resolved in it’s own right.
If you just smash ending in the middle of a fight with a “Continued in Part 2”, then I don’t consider that a completed work, and I’m not sure I disagree with Mara on that point. On the other hand if you have a “You defeated this enemy, but this is obviously just a henchman of a greater foe, and the fight continues in Part 2”, then that’s at least one arc completed. And yea, there’s a lot of grey area in there, but that’s fundamentally what I think the point is.
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That makes me want to go down the rabbithole of “How to Sequel.” I’m really excited about 2019 because we’ll hope to be bringing out the sequels to Superlatives and Grand Academy for Future Villains, both of which are written to function as standalone games if you don’t want to import a save or for players who haven’t tried the first one.
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I definitely agree on your point about the endings.
It’s funny, because I realized a few days ago that all four of my published games end on blatant cliffhangers and don’t really have self contained stories.
Mass Mother Murderer will be my first story that is the beginning of a series but still has a self-contained plot and could stand on its own. (It was actually originally planned as a stand alone, but then my imagination took over as usual.)
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I have no issue with author saying I will divide my work and Do a part thing to win more money I have even defend that Seven heirs following that route
A very different thing Is an author have already writing the entire stuff and editors divided it and sell the plan one thing chopped to gain few more bucks . That is were the immoral part is. Dickens write in parts most of his novel to be published in newspapers and later is when he sell the hole as a book that is perfectly fine. Due writer and editors are honest about it.
I really would pay for episodic novels like Dickens did like ten euros the season if I could alter something via voting or something
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I’m really intrigued about this, and am excited to see how the sequels work as standalones as well as pure sequels! In general and for future-project … reasons.
@Mary_Duffy is right on the money about being rigorous about efficient code, by the way - in my draft revisions for Blood Money I cut a bunch of superfluous repetitions with her guidance and it was a tighter game for it. I’m really happy to have gone through that process - it’s improved my early-draft efficiency no end!
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My hope is that it helps reframe a writer’s thinking around how to create neat and clean branches/optimize efficient “flavor” text, which will in turn make a playthrough stronger and more fun.
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The major trouble with the book comparison is that with a normal book, the “read-through” is the entire word length and with an IF game it isn’t. There should not be a straight ebook to IF game comparison.
This fault goes both ways because with an IF game you have the multi-pathing and different read-throughs.
I’m not saying the per session metric is a good metric to advertise but when you start comparison shop as a consumer, it would help knowing both average play-session length and number of expected replays.
I do understand that this all that opens a can of worms regarding further expectations from the publisher’s stand point but the raw comparison of word count in IF gaming to books is itself just as problematic.
A visual novel gaming comparison is also problematic due to non-matching qualities of VN vs IF games so there is no easy price comparison model.
This is why, unlike @MultipleChoice, I see the IF market staying strong as long as the pricing does not start going too far into VN territory.
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@RETowers - I think the question becomes ‘what do we base pricing on?’. Do we base it on the APT or the total word count?
If a novel is typically 100K words, but an IF is at 500K but has an APT of 75K, you have to ask how all of those factors help to determine the price.
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I’ll be interested in seeing those, especially as they were not planned as a series!
CCH1 got dinged a few times for “not wrapping up enough plot points,” so in CCH2 I added a villain (the charity auction villain, actually!) whose entire arc would be resolved in Part 2. That helped out tremendously, as it let me “set up the chess board” with the major plot elements for Part 3, while still making sure that the player felt they accomplished a couple of specific things in 2. But then again, I’m using the same MC and all the same side characters.
I’m really interested in seeing how games like Superlatives that allowed multiple endings find some sort of common jumping off point for a sequel.
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In the case of Superlatives I can explain a little. So you can carry through certain playthroughs, but not all. The player begins the game in a new role but not a new character, with several aspects from the first game carried over. Alternatively, you can enter the world of the game totally fresh, without a previous playthrough and so the new role you play in this word, is also a new character.
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A bit like Dragon Age: Awakenings, then? I like! Looking forward to that one a lot.
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I don’t have any regrets about the length of Tally Ho. In fact, there are a few scenes I wish I’d made time to add into it. Cakes and Ale is going to be three volumes for sure, and, while I can’t know for sure how long the whole thing will end up, I can say that I’m in the middle of chapter 3 out of 8 of the first game, and I’m at about 300k words. So it’s going to be a long one, but that’s mostly a combination of my naturally verbose style and the chatty style of the author I am riffing on.
However, and this is the big point, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else. Don’t do as I do. It turns out that long books take a long time to write. I have been writing a scene where you move a table down a flight of stairs for the past week and a half. In an ideal world I would have the ability to spend that same time and write four games (and make x4 the money, at that), I guess. But I have to just go with knowing that the CoG editors know how I write at this point and hopefully Tally Ho won me enough readership to make a three-part rather long game a worthwhile endeavor. I think it will be. But as I say, I don’t think it’s a path that I would recommend to anyone else.
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I hope so tally is a great game and I will love read a series from you sure it will be puns and crazy scenws with bears and birds
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Cats and horses, for this series, I think…
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