How do you calculate game length?

Game Development
1

How the title sounds. Do you copy and paste all the text in a play through and count that up, or do you word count your actual code?

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2

Random test! If you run a full-text-included pass of Randomtest, say through 100 iterations, the test will give you the final word count. Then you just move the decimal, and voilĂ , word count of an average playthrough. ( :

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3

so you divide the final word count by 100? For us math-challenged.

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4

Yes, that’s right. If you run 100 iterations you just move the decimal point backwards two places (one per zero). So if you came up with 2,387,896 words after 100 iterations, your average word count per play-through would be 23,878 words (or 23,879 if you want to round up).

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5

Hmm. I don’t get a word count on my random test. it just says passed - RANDOMTEST PASSED
Time: 1.328s
Edit - I figured out what you meant - you need to check the “show full text option”… for those as slow as me today.

Word count: 1642425
RANDOMTEST PASSED
Time: 2.532s

so my test says the average play through has 16,424 word in it so far.

Edit 3 - So what does the average play through get in words for most published works?

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6

The minimum is 30,000 I heard

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7

Thank you. I only have about 35,000 in total written so far - so that each play through gets about half of those is encouraging.

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8

Thanks for the answers! That is so…elegant a solution!

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9

totally lost me :confused:

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To be clear: the minimum word count of 20,000 for Hosted Games is total word count, not average play-through length.

You have to remember, it costs us about $1000 to review and publish a game to the different platforms. At a bare minimum, the game has to be long enough that readers will find the ads sufficiently annoying that some portion of them will pay $1 to turn them off. And it has to be in sufficient quantities so that we at least break-even on that proposition (so, > 1900 people have to pay $1 on a 20k word game in order for us to not lose money on it).

That said, we much prefer to publish games that we can charge $2 or $3 for, for example.

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11

oh want to hear something about your ad system?

because if you go offline and play the game the ad system won’t work when they restart so it makes it ad free at that point so ad systems are pointless when people do it that way so i think making it online only would solve the issue their and if you buy the story you can read it offline afterwards because trust me its pretty pointless to have an ad system when all you gotta do is go offline so when you restart the story their are no ads at all

i doubt anybody would want to mention that because they don’t want to be blamed or something of that sorts for doing so.
@jasonstevanhill

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Really? For me the games with adds simply will not start whenever I try to play them off-line. They just crash.

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yeah i’m using a samsung tablet and when I lose connection to WiFi while I am restarting a story the ads don’t work and i can read without the ad popping up
@Cecilia_Rosewood