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!
I, forget the commands on Windows, but the āofficialā 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.)
Anyone know the windows equivalent? Iām curious about this, too- other than randomtest, if thereās a way to figure up word total that doesnāt include code.
CSIDE will give you word count with and without code, by either project or scene. Randomtest is the best youāll get for average playthrough though.
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? Thatās 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%?
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.
All files in the scene folder which includes stats (plus technically the choicescript_upgrade.txt
file, which is like 50ish words).
So, would it be alright to give (when submitting the game) put a rough count of bonus words into the description? like
ā250,000 words, including 15,000 words of bonus materialā
or something?
Hereās the thing, whatever anyone puts in word count, if mine is different Iām going to overwrite it. IMO, itās best to use one method of word count, and have that be uniform across all games. My general suggestion has been that āitās fine to leave the word count blankā, but maybe thatās not strong enough. Honestly, I prefer for it to be blank, because that means I donāt have to overwrite anything. I just think uniformity in that regard is a better UX.
I canāt 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?
Iām kind of worried about this. My game will likely have a huge wordcount, over half a million, but one ārunā 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 youāll 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 donāt want heaps of too short 1* reviews. Thatās just how it is. Try to up the 15k ones closer to 20k if you can or accept that youāll probably get heaps of crit on the stores. Thereās a good proportion of people who only play games once so you canāt 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 youāre 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 )