You won’t get rid of me so easily @Havenstone havie We will reach together the very end of Evil Gandhi in our old uears lol 
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Steam gamers favor your style of game. Even if it takes a while, they remember Half-life and still wait the day that gets done.
The other markets are different but I have a feeling that the more casual base there will purchase your games in waves … when your second is released, it will spur purchases of the first (especially by gift givers).
of course, that is just my humble opinion and ymmv.
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Ghandi will rise…
mind not spontaneously using nukes willy nilly this time?
@Havenstone yea i’m another willing aristocrat waiting for the release of my homeland and the downfall of the therge
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I prefer 150k+ I may be in the minority but I still consider 50+ long depending on the writing style. Some authors can make the game seem longer than it is (which isn’t a bad thing) while others make them seem shorter or it can just be me 
My own experience with CoG word count is as follows:
Choice of Robots (~350K or so) - I wasn’t aware of the word count metric when I wrote Choice of Robots. I just wanted to write a game that was significantly branchier than the games I’d seen, without sacrificing play length. Later, the editors reacted to this game’s success with puzzlement, and at least one seemed to convince himself with a regression that it succeeded on the basis of its word count. Also, some people in reviews still complain that this game is too short.
Choice of Alexandria (~90K) - Despite the aforementioned word count regression, two of the editors approached me at a con and asked if I could write shorter games and more of them. I wrote Alexandria, but it still took me two years because historical fiction was hard. Alexandria has about 10X fewer sales than Robots, but I think this is mostly because people don’t know what’s cool about ancient Alexandria (and also the cover art became not very good, but that’s another story). The main complaint about the game when people do play it is its length, but that’s a little silly because it mostly lost words by being less branchy, so I think they’re reacting to the metric. The game’s approval on Steam was still the same as Robots, 97%.
Choice of Magics (~550K): I was trying to reverse the things negatively correlated with sales for Choice of Magics, so that I didn’t have another game that just sort of disappeared into the ether like Alexandria. So I was shooting for a word count at least as high as Robots, which I planned to do by being at least as branchy. The game’s word count attracted at least a few naysayers claiming that it must not have been efficiently coded, which is funny because I literally patched the language to make it less verbose (adding arguments for gosub and removing goto from normal control flow). The game’s higher sales than Alexandria are also attributable to the more obviously fun theme.
The main reason I don’t think word count is a great metric is that it’s describing an area when players want to know the two dimensions, length and width. Also, the many ways efficiency and coding style affect it mean that there’s really only like one significant digit in the figure.
But, the figures are just literally bigger and more impressive-sounding numbers than the others one might use, so for marketing purposes, they’re probably here to stay. Self-servingly, I kind of like them because there’s a writer saying “the first million words are for practice,” so when you count my unpublished work…actually I’m not sure what that saying gets me, but I’ve got over a million code-plus-words now, so that’s cool I guess.
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@kgold Being sincere with you my problem with Alexandria was no the length of the theme It was I found my character terribly boring and all characters one dimensional too point for me felt really really long like oh my god when this will end.
Still i love your other work so much. Still Alexandria felt without passion and flat. But Not saying is bad.
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Hmm, well, all the characters in Alexandria besides Nefertari were real, including the MC, who was Eratosthenes. I like them - Eratosthenes who discovered the circumference of the world with mere shadows, Sosibius and his insane climb to power, Berenice who murdered her first husband in flagrante but went on to be this romantic figure. But, I did feel constrained by any history buffs who might be lying in wait to not make up too much random false crap about each of them, and that probably led to your impression of not being fleshed out.
I probably should have made up more fake history. Then I’d have more words!
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I played with the female. My bit is you follow a original route instead of going for the intricacies of The Greek dynasty in Egypt and all the assassination and incest and how academic was a political weapon The main focus is discover? Teach a tyrant? is like I didn’t get the plot.
Carl Sagan In cosmos made one of best explanation of Eratostenes grabbing a stick in a beach and how for first time instead of grab one to kill something we grab it to size the Earth.
Brilliant Alexandria so sad that we almost have nothing from there I am sure If somehow we could read the entire collection they could teach stuff wven the people of today.
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I tend to think any metric regarding a creative work should not be taken as a direct indicator of quality; they are attempts to measure something that cannot be measured. They can be used to get at why something succeeds or fails, but are not inherently success or failure.
I will say I think @kgold games in a sense do succeed based on word count; I love how much they branch and that requires more wordcount to do all the branches. But it’s the branching that matters, not the word count. Hence why I’ve taken to ignoring the number.
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I was just saying elsewhere that I sometimes find the shorter, older games much more replayable than longer ones. If the longer games had a couple of save points, like Mecha Ace, or were in a few parts like Herorise or Vampire, they would be less frustration over replaying the whole game when a single choice loses vital stat points. A good story could easily be quite long, if it didn’t have to be read so many times. Why didn’t any games use save points after Mecha Ace anyway?
There’s no function in choicescript to do so, and coding saves is laborious and unintuitive. I honestly wish we could get official save commands built into the language, because there’s no reason that can’t be a thing, but if every author needs to build their own saving scripts, you’re not going to see many games that do it. Plus on top of that there are a surprisingly high amount of people who don’t want save points for some reason.
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I thinks that’s probably quite true. I saw reviews when it came out comparing it to Robots with the comment- it’s the same author but this one is so much shorter! Since it sounds like the playthrough length wasn’t much different, it would have been interesting if it had been published without a wordcount just to see how it was received 
I actually don’t mind the coverart, but it’s pretty dark and sort of blends in. I also wonder if a lot of people understood why there was a lighthouse on there and thought it looked uninteresting. I wonder if it would have a bump in sales if it had a brighter cover. (But then again, once it’s out, maybe not.) Being historical fiction with a description full of names not everyone is going to recognise rather than magic or superheroes, I reckon that probably had a fair impact on sales as well. (From conversations I’ve had with authors about their sales, genre seems to make a big difference to popularity. Probably bigger than length or story quality although they obviously contribute.)
True- you should have thrown a sea monster or a dragon battle in there 
Just a thought- would a rating system help with the absolute word count issue? ie: You could have a branchiness/breadth, and an average playthrough length from low to high instead of the exact number of words. Hard to do for HG, but since COG’s are more standardised in the editing maybe?
Casuals doesn’t understand ratings like that they will get confused and let even worse rating in apps stores. Also it would be a way to games long lost that psychological appeal to some casual market as they don’t want to understand game length
As @Havenstone mentions in another thread, this is just the lack of a “back button” issue in slightly different terms. With that in mind I am going to put forth the most complete, comprehensive and forthright answer given. Keep in mind @Mary_Duffy is only the messenger here and any changes to this policy is as she puts it: “1000 times above her pay-grade”
I think this pretty much explains why official CoG games are designed the way they are, so this thread should not be derailed further. If we wish to reopen this comprehensive dialogue once more, I do suggest moving it to one of the more appropriate threads.
PS - You may or may not agree with this design philosophy. Many in the community do not. Never-the-less this is what it is.
PPS - sorry for drawing the bulls eye on your back Mary - your explanation is the best I found and should answer everyone’s questions, so I felt it would be best to bring it to those who were not yet aware of it.
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I chortled.
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Choice of Rebels had three…I felt the game was just too long to leave people completely save-less, and wanted to give readers the option to go chase a mid-game branch they found interesting without replaying the whole thing. Rebels also does make use of unforeseen consequences, so there’s perhaps a bit more justification to give readers a limited rewind option.
I have to say, adding the save points wouldn’t have been all that laborious if I’d saved it for the end–probably would have taken 20 minutes of cut-and-paste. It was a little more time-consuming because I incorporated it early on, so that every time I added a stat, I had to add it into all the savescene files as well as four sets in the startup file (e.g. stat, savestat, save2stat, save3stat). There may of course be an even easier way to do a save point than my typically kludgy, unprofessional code.
In writing Rebels Game 2, though, I’ll not add checkpoints until the end. CSIDE makes it easier to playtest without them.
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Never the less, perhaps I could learn from you when the time comes.
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I am totally against saves and back button. i only use them to testing wips. If going totally against my philosophy about IF if you don’t assume the consequences of your choices what hell are you doing playing if go read a novel. There is no right choices in cog best scenes came from what seem failuresAnd why authors make so good less good scenes if people just restarting and only read 1/5 of content
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I disagree, especially when games like Affairs of the Court or the Lost Heir have abrupt deaths if you make a wrong choice. Those are two games I would have enjoyed much more with a save system and honestly I regret purchasing them.
I am more likely to play a game more than once and explore options if there is a save function present.
I rather hate the purist rhetoric that a save function wrecks games. Just don’t use it if you don’t want to, and let the rest of us enjoy knowing that we can go back and not have to start at the very beginning, which after a while is just tedious.
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Please remember that a save system is not the topic at hand, game length is, so please continue this conversation in PMs as this particular topic has also been discussed at length in many other easily found threads.
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