How to get total word count

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to get the total word count for your game (so all plot branches are included)? The best I found in the forum is to use randomtest.html to get the average playthrough. Thanks!

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I, forget the commands on Windows, but the ā€œofficialā€ word counts (i.e., the ones we actually use), I get by running wc on Mac (Grepping out the comments first). If you have a Mac, open iTerm, cd over to the scenes folder, and run cat * | grep -v "\*comment" | wc -w. (Or, run wc -w *.txt for just the word count without removing the comments.)

(Edit: I think cat * | grep -v "\*" | wc -w will give you more or less without code, which is not a number we use anywhere, but some of the forum seem interested in.)

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Anyone know the windows equivalent? Iā€™m curious about this, too- other than randomtest, if thereā€™s a way to figure up word total that doesnā€™t include code.

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CSIDE will give you word count with and without code, by either project or scene. Randomtest is the best youā€™ll get for average playthrough though.

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One that note:
What is included in the official word count?
all files? just the scene files? all files without the stats?

And what is a good average percentage of words seen per playthrough? Thatā€™s a doubt I have to limit myself an reduce branches if I am reducing too much the percentage.

IIRC a blogentry or such said around 30-50%?

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Thanks I am about 40% and dropping so I have to checking my plans. thanks god for gosub_scene and gosub_scene label I have improving the effectiveness Like a lot . That and fake choice command are key to reduce copy paste and redundancy.

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All files in the scene folder which includes stats (plus technically the choicescript_upgrade.txt file, which is like 50ish words).

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So, would it be alright to give (when submitting the game) put a rough count of bonus words into the description? like
ā€˜250,000 words, including 15,000 words of bonus materialā€™
or something?

Thank you @RETowers! Grateful for the help :slight_smile:

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Hereā€™s the thing, whatever anyone puts in word count, if mine is different Iā€™m going to overwrite it. IMO, itā€™s best to use one method of word count, and have that be uniform across all games. My general suggestion has been that ā€œitā€™s fine to leave the word count blankā€, but maybe thatā€™s not strong enough. Honestly, I prefer for it to be blank, because that means I donā€™t have to overwrite anything. I just think uniformity in that regard is a better UX.

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I canā€™t speak for others, but seeing how I do have ~120k words of bonus material in my thing already the total would feel misleading the playerā€¦

Then again, the final game will likely hit around 1 million wwc, soā€¦ does it even matter at that point?

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Iā€™m kind of worried about this. My game will likely have a huge wordcount, over half a million, but one ā€œrunā€ of the game could be like 15,000 if you just immediately go for the first romance option you see and stick with that and never take chances.

I guess I should continue doing surveys to see how people play the game. I anticipate the average run will likely be 2-3 romance option sequences (loosely 15,000-20,000 words playthrough each), plus a bunch of bonus content that would roughly add up to 20,000 words.

So rough estimate youā€™ll probably see about 10% of the game on a given run.

Yeesh.

Yeah, so word of advice, long word count + anything less than 20,000 words min per play through is probably a bad idea if you donā€™t want heaps of too short 1* reviews. Thatā€™s just how it is. Try to up the 15k ones closer to 20k if you can or accept that youā€™ll probably get heaps of crit on the stores. Thereā€™s a good proportion of people who only play games once so you canā€™t rely on good replayability to offset a short play through count. IMO 10% of the word count on an average run is too low, but write it how you want, just realise what will probably happen if youā€™re writing primarily for an audience rather than yourself.

(Oh yeah and 500k words is apparently no longer considered huge for a game any more, just saying :wink:)