Hi guys! Name’s Nebroxah, or Ben if you really prefer. I’m not published, but I have a book in the works, and have been thinking about starting a project quite like this for a long time now. I’d like to know just a few things about starting out.
First of all, how many words does a typical game have? I know that it would be pretty difficult to put a single number to it, but are there lower limits and upper limits? I assume it’s pretty long.
Next, has anybody ever used Choice Script on an iPad before? If so, did it work well?
And finally, what kind of ‘splash art’ does a game need? Just one solid piece, or multiple, different ones in different sizes?
Even if my ideas never really leave the ground, it’s a pleasure to meet you all, and thanks for any tips you can throw my way!
First off, welcome to the wonderful world of CoG! My name is @fantom and I’ll be your guide for the evening!
Word count varies quite a lot in Choice games. Hosted games, which are made by experienced writers typically, I’ve noticed tend to clock in at about 200,000+, though some are lower like in the 75,000 or so range. Hosted games, which more often tend to be first time or beginning writers, tend to range anywhere between 50,000 to 150,000, though I think the record is Tin Star with 1.2 million words. But there have been some fantastic ones with lower word counts.
As for the second question, I believe @poison_mara writes on an iphone using dropbox and such, but it is more difficult obviously.
As for cover art, I’ll just quote the wonderful @Lucid
I’ve used Textastic on the iPad, which does cost like $5-$10.
It works well, with the key features of line numbers, word count, spell check, and find/replace. ALso, it syncs to dropbox.
You can even run and play your game within it by opening mygame.js
Only thing I found a PC really needful for was global find/replaces across all my files at once if I altered a variable. It’s be tedious to do one at a time.
This is a great question! As a Padawan of sorts I am looking to understand the ways of the choice scripting. I am sorry to add onto @Nebroxah thread here, but we probably have a lot of the same questions.
The info so far is great - my next choice-sensitive question is - is there a guide as to the steps to what to do “next”…
I have created my choice scripts game:
Next: You need to X
Is this post it in a WIP on this forum? When/what/how do you kick off Beta testing for my game? Run the test scripts?
I am currently running the test scripts and I ‘think’ I need to look into WIP or Beta testing - but I am not sure.
Thoughts, help, suggestions, force-push - would be great!
If you’ve got a description of your game and a link to the game which doesn’t break at the first choice you make you’ve basically got enough to make a WiP thread (you might want to wait until you’ve finished the first chapter or something comparable though, just so that you’ve got something for people to comment on.)
For Beta testing, that largely relies on the author. For starters, you should have something that’s finished, and there are some things to keep in mind as well.
For prospective hosted games there are no real hard or fast rules asides from that the game should pass both randomtest and quicktest, that it must be over 20.000 words and that it should’ve gone through a public Beta on the forum. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should be able to access the Beta version of your game though. You can also do it through private messages on the forum.)
I would suggest that you continue testing until you’ve made sure the story is at least mostly consistent and doesn’t have too many typo’s or grammar issues. No matter how awesome your story might be, neatness and a good first impression are very important.
I learned the bulk of what I know about choice script from this lil game/guide, though its not entirely finished it is immensely useful for translating the basics.
Oh, um, actually my guide still includes the old info on dropbox. Unless you’ve had your dropbox account for something like 3+ years, the current description is wrong. Use this instead. (Or short steps: 1) Compile, 2) Put that in dropbox, 3) Copy the link, 4) When pasting the link, change www. to dl. and dropbox to dropboxusercontent.
As a Padawan of sorts I am looking to understand the ways of the choice scripting. I am sorry to add onto