I’m trying to figure out how to pace myself for the game I’m designing. Obviously some games are longer than others cough Tin Star cough but I’m wondering if you can give me an estimate of how many pages of text files you ended up with after coding your game (or word count, if that’s easier.)
Am I looking at 300 pages of writing/coding total, or 500, or whereabouts, if I want to make a game with some decent variety but that isn’t quite novel-length from start to end of any given play-through?
My almost finished WIP clocks in around 150k words and takes about 2.5 to
3 hours to read on the first go around.
I guess that’s like a novella length or something?
I measure files by their memory size. So my finished game was 1.3 MB, comprised of text files that varied in size from between 50 to 200 kb give or take.
Wow! Not counting any image files, right? If 150,000 words is about right for a finished game, I’m 5% done, which is encouraging (I’ve only been at this for two weeks, and of course learning a new coding language slowed me down at first.)
If it’s more like 1.3 MB - by the way, I am assuming your game is not an epic, but a more average length for COG? - I can’t even calculate the tiny fraction I have done. Well, I could, but it would be really depressing…
EDIT: Oh, wait. Either I’m terrible at doing math in my head, or I misremembered how many kilobytes are in a megabyte. File size-wise, it clocks in at around 7% done. Whew!!
Thanks for your answers, @distracteddad and @HornHeadFan!
File sizes and numbers of hours to play kind of seem like a bad ruler to me. Generally I’d say word count is much more accurate. I have one published title, and another that’s been submitted and is going to be published soon. Trial of the Demon Hunter was 85k words and Captive of Fortune (the sequel) is 115k words. In the future, though, I’m generally going to try to make my stories longer because I’ve realized it’s seen as too bad of a thing if a title is too short. Without going into too much detail, here are the works I’ve already started on but haven’t finished and the ones that I just plan to write, and how long I expect them to be.
Colonising Kepler 62e: Inception - 100k
Malice Defeats Innocence - 150k
Winter of the Bovine - 200k
Transitions of Power - Volume Three of Demons Among Men: 250k
Silence of the Wicked - Volume Four of Demons Among Men: 300k
The Magician’s Task - 500k
Moo.
(I was hoping this was a new volume in the Demon Hunter series, cause cow-devils are seriously underused, but I take it it’ll be something different?)
Hehe xD yeah, it’s something different. I probably won’t start writing it until I’ve finished The Magician’s Task and Demons Among Men, but you basically play as a dairy/veal calf (depending on your gender) in the animal agriculture industry.
@Sashira, I think I will concentrate on shorter games. The minimum requirement has been announced to be only 20 000 words. My Path of Light is 51 000, the sequel is 46 000. I think my next game will be somewhere in this range. The longer the game, the slimmer the chance of it being ever completed, I think.
So far, my game has a 243,326 word count, and it’s about a third of the way completed. However, this is due to the fact that the game could be seen as five or six different games in one.
The larger it is, the better chance it has of being well-received. 
Such are the balances in life. I’m aiming at around 150K words worth of text + coding, I think. We’ll see where it ends up.
That sounds like a good length. It’s the average, I’d say. Depending on how linear or branching it is, it could seem really long or still kind of short.
How are y’all getting word counts? Just literal raw words, or somehow excluding stuff like *label foo?
For me, literally word count of my text files, including code. All of my variables have underscores and stuff, so my code doesn’t use up many unless it’s something really complicated. It’s entirely possible my word count will go down as I get better at coding and simplify more stuff. This is more of an estimate anyway.
Good point. If you say 160k and 20k of that is code a) wow and b) it’s still close.
Generally, we count code, since it’s what fits the story all together. 
For me, the coding is somewhere around 10% of the word count.
I write my narrative sections first, then I code them. I use word count on the narrative sections only. I have no idea what it would be with the code, as TextEdit has no word counter.