No, this not an attempt at a dirty joke… but I like your thinking…
Anyway, I just wanted to know how long would be too long for a Cog in your opinion. So far I am about half way done my “Shipwrecked” title and after reading it from the start to where I currently am. I takes me just a little under an hour. It takes my gf about 35-40 minutes. http://www.mywaygamesonline.com/ - (My promotional site) http://www.mywaygamesonline.com/games/shipwrecked/ - (Not the latest version but pretty close to it.)
I figured that at the end, it will be about 1 hour 30 minutes to read. The way I’ve written it as most of you know, is narrative heavy with lots of character development, so that’s probable why. The only thing is that when I skip through it without reading all the text then it only takes about 4 minutes. lol.
At first I was really concerned, but is it possible that this is actually a good thing? My thinking is that the first time someone plays it, then they will get the full experience (as it takes 1.5 hours to read the whole thing) , and really feel like it has “meat” to it but the next time around they don’t really care about the story so much as they’ve already read it and they just want to check out all the different options.
What are your thoughts. Also I was just wondering, how long did it take you to read vampire? or broadside? anyone remember, cause I cant. I remember romance taking me like 25 minutes the first time but I cant remember the other cogs.
It is a similar worry for me with my game, Zombie Exodus. It takes most people 45-60 mins which I think is short. It took me 1.5 hours for vampire. If you are halfway done, then it should be 90-120 mins, which seems reasonable.
Personally, to avoid giving off a overwhelming feeling for your games, I’d suggest you don’t put too much on one page. If you have plenty of long passages, divide them on several pages, add in some fake choices or maybe some real choices so that they get to do something while reading little by little.
A game can actually feel shorter if you add in plenty of choices, real or fake - wall of text certainly make the game feel a lot “longer”. Too long if you ask me.
Personally, I love long games, even without a save function. The longer the game, the better. On the other hand, as CremePudding mentioned, that is only really true if there are choices to the game. With Shipwrecked, I felt that there wasn’t so much a ‘game’ as a novel with a couple of choices. I simply couldn’t get into it, but if there were a couple of choices, even if they were small choices with small impacts, I feel like I could get through more. With with Shipwrecked I felt a little like ‘I don’t want a novel, I want a Game.’ On the other hand, the sheer length is impressive. After I stopped reading, I flipped through it and was a bit astounded at that being ‘unfinished’, but then I hit three pages of solid ‘wall of text’ and basically said ‘geez, I’m not going to read that’.
Personally, I feel that Depth is more important than Length (oh geez, this is starting to sound bad :p). If I feel like I’m affecting what happens, I don’t really care if it’s a half hour or three hour game.
(I’ll try to play Shipwrecked again, but I just don’t feel like I’m up for a story right now).
CoV took me like 2hr… People who finishes it in 30 min… didn’t really read all the writing like as of what reaperoa said…I agree with him that when people see long writing or multiple pages there not gonna read it… even though I do for some reason…lol… I say if your half way It should be like 60min… should be 90min-120min. Or more before you finish…I perfer long books then short ones. Besides you could always update your book on the market when you finish some more…
Oh JimD… Haha it took me like 1hr to finish yours… am I a slow reader?..
