Length of game influences buying?

Generally I play these games cause I enjoy role-playing. I feel that if the game is particularly short then it won’t have time to develop depth, to give me a degree of choice in how my character acts or to introduce characters I can become interested in.

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When was this, out of curiosity? Was it a matter of lack of familiarity with the language, or something else?

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I’m going to posit that @gower and @jasonstevanhill don’t swap editing notes on games not written by Kreg Segall, and guess that it was an early version of Midsummer Night’s Choice

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Nope, wasn’t Midsummer.

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Oh, my Now i am super intrigued in knowing… lol :wink:

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Some inconceivably early version of Tally Ho that would eventually have become a million-word game?

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Are we playing “guess the game and win a free copy”?
One dollar entry fee?
Just kidding.
But now I’m curious too. :smile:

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Oh, it wasn’t one of Gower’s games, it was Killing Time.

Back when that pitch was approved, the check-in process was a lot looser. I didn’t realize until the full draft was delivered that the author didn’t really understand string variables. I literally cut 100k words by making use of the string variables the author had made but not used.

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As a reader I give you a congratulations for the honesty. Due I have seen here in some Spanish if that literally buffed their world account at first on purpose. Even more when word account is so important for many casuals so not buff content is a interesting weird integrity in the market.

This sounds like something I would do. Coding is not my best skill in these projects. I would be one of those that benefit by having a tutor in coding :slight_smile:

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Would you want me to do a public coding tutorial with you?

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Sure… I’d offer my contest entry if you like ( or anything you desire). I will warn you though, I am quite dense when it comes to grasping scripting and coding at times.

I really am not to the point of coding on anything else yet.

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Oh, that might get interesting.

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Actually this could teach me a trick or two? Maybe I’ll also attend…

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Sounds like something that should be streamed.

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First of all sorry for dredging up this old thread from the depths but I want to readjust my previous opinion I stated here.

In my previous post I stated that wordcount most certainly influenced my buying decision but keeping track of my recent decision’s I’m noticing it’s becoming less and less so. And more important to me becomes the rating it has received.

With generalizing a little bit I think I can state that the overall consensus is that a story with a high word count is generally received better then a story with a lower word count.

However for myself I notice that word count is becoming less and less relevant for me. And I think the main reason for this is the high % of bloat. And with that I mean that I currently notice a trend in demos where everything is over-descriptive to the point that it actually makes my head spin and I have no clue what’s going on.

I wouldn’t doubt that something like that could be happening with a couple different stories. But I think the vast majority of the time, longer games are longer because they have more chapters, events, substance, etc, and not because they have 2 or 3x more detail per sentence. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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When writing what’s the average word count to make a good story? Like per chapter?

I’m not sure you’ll find a useful average word count per chapter just because the chapter lengths of games varies so greatly: also a “good” story is so subjective that this is a hard question to answer! I think there is no real average and that word count per chapter should be dictated by the needs of the story.

I do recommend checking out this thread for a list of popular COG and HG games listed by word count; dividing by the number of chapters in each title might give you an answer, but again, I’m not sure how useful it would be because some chapters in those titles are very short and some are very long!

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Honestly, if the theme of a game is enticing enough (looking at you, Rent-a-Vice) I’m willing to pay up for a shorter game. But I will always, always prefer games that are longer. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for buying and length, but if I’m on the fence and the game is short I usually won’t even bother. I like my games to have some meat to them!

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