Yeah I was gonna say, longer stories becoming the norm kind of incentivises worse coding. Gotta inflate that word count somehow.
I’ve got something like this. Rumours and tidbits get added to a codex you can read. If you’re struggling, you can bring them up in conversations. Characters can offer their own thoughts to it, i.e. in hints, that can be tailored to their stats or backstory.
Thinking of breaking my WIP up with 2 or 3 questions before the new content starts, like rank from 1-10 how much you like X. I feel like most WIP readers (me included) sort of just consume the content and dont really offer any feedback. Which is what you want half the time
I take it you’re in Pakistan. My heart goes out to you. I would probably put that there might be an internet blackout where you are, but I’m not sure about really bringing up details, since that might lead to unwanted attention (you know how the internet can be sometimes).
For some, I guess that’s right, but not everyone’s wordcounts are from code inflation and repeated lines.
According to CSIDE, my demo is about 518663 words long with code, 472170 without it, and a play-through averages at 150k words. That means there is about 46k words of code, which is about 9% of my total word count. I try hard to limit repeated lines and paragraphs within my writing.
Not really, honestly, because writing inefficient code often causes more problems for the writer. It’s horrible to edit if you’re having to edit the same thing in five different places.
There are plenty of less-efficiently coded Hosted Games, or ones that copy-paste paragraphs. Wayhaven does the latter throughout, for example. But even copy-pasting paragraphs isn’t going to cause such a massive wordcount jump that a Wayhaven instalment’s million-ish words is misleading. They’re still extremely long games to play.
Conversations about wordcount come up a lot and cause a lot of soul-searching and worry, and I don’t honestly think they need to. Wordcount isn’t readers’ primary concern, it’s the genre and whether the writing grabs them and they like the characters. We’re fortunate in this medium because when titles go on sale, they include free demos so the audience can try them out beforehand and get a sense for whether they think they’ll enjoy the rest.
The vast majority of the time, people will end up writing more than they think they will overall anyway: everyone who’s written games on the longer side says this every time it gets discussed. (Or even on the short to medium side! This happened to me when I wrote Noblesse Oblige which was explicitly intended to be shorter.)
Write in the way that works for you, that does the job, and feels good when you play it. When you playtest your own game, you’ll know whether it feels like a scene or description needs more breathing room or whether the pace is dragging. Or whether you need to trim a branch because it’s not quite fitting with the rest.
If it helps reduce anxiety, don’t look at your wordcount at all and solely pay attention to how it feels to play. I’m not sure if you can disable wordcount tracking in CSIDE but you can in VS Code or Sublime Text.
(I actually decided not to share my wordcount tracking publicly for The Earth Has Teeth because I was frustrated with the bigger=better perspective and intense focus on wordcount going around.)
Some readers are also looking for shorter games as well (I know I do when life gets busy), so it’s always good to just go with what feels right for the project!
In other news, I am slowly recovering from being sick for the past couple of weeks. It’s totally crashed my writing schedule, but I did manage to edit and rewrite a small section yesterday. Hopeful for getting more done today.
Yeah, this, all the way. Code efficiency is something plenty of people pride themselves on, and fair enough. It’s a very useful skill, especially if you ever want to program anything more elaborate than a CS game.
But if there’s ever been a CS game coded inefficiently enough to push the total word count into a fundamentally different bracket, e.g. turning a “medium”-feeling game into what looks like a “long” game, I’ve yet to hear of it.
Maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist. Multireplace really doesn’t save that many words proportionate to the kind of game most of us are coding. Gosubs are probably the single biggest win for reducing word count (keeps you from duplicating big chunks of text), but I’ve yet to see a game where condensing all the repeated text into gosubs would turn a “long” game into a medium or short one. Every game I’ve ever seen cited as an example of coding inefficiency is genuinely big – either long, or replayable, and feels that way when reading it – notwithstanding more of the words than strictly necessary sitting in the code.
Or maybe a hugely-padded-out game exists, but just isn’t popular enough to be much talked about… because like Harris says, no one cares mostly about word count. Readers who care about long games want the long game experience, and a needlessly inflated game wouldn’t get the kind of positive reviews that attract a dedicated audience.
So don’t worry about your word count. And definitely don’t worry about other people’s word count. Do your best to write the kind of story you enjoy reading, with the level of variability you enjoy seeing.
Gosub is the thing I struggle with the most in CS. It feels very jarring to move parts of the story out of order, and I’ve yet to get comfortable with it. I’ve been trying to use Gosub_scene structures as a replacement, but that has its own complications. Do you ever get used to arranging scenes non-linearly?
*gosub_scene especially is a lifesaver both code-efficiency-wise and code-maintainability-wise if you use any kind of de facto functions that need to be called in more than one scene.
I’m a software dev sci-fi nerd. I breathe non-linearity.
I’m with @LiliArch on this one. It’s actually very nice to be able to have a centralized area for regularly repeated sections or, as I’ve found common in my story, for more complex code so that I can shove the functions to the bottom of the file after my *finish. That way I never worry about seeing them on accident, but still have easy access to them.
My argument that I was trying to make wasn’t really about deception at all. At the end of the day I don’t really think we are obsessing that much about how long a game is in the first place. I guess I just wanted to talk about how word count is perceived. I’m glad we have average playthrough length now to help with properly getting an idea of a game’s length. I agree with it being a great middle ground, and on top of that it means by looking at the ratio of playthrough length / total length you can get an idea of how much the game might change between playthroughs.
You are right on gosubs, honestly I was just pulling out the first thing that came from the hat. It’s not like anyone has gone through the process of condensing a long game with ‘inefficient’ code to compare anyway. There was a specific project I was thinking about in regards to this discussion but I don’t think it would be polite to say which one it is lol.
Also want to say that at the end of the day all that really matters is if your story feels complete and compelling! What started this discussion was talking about 30k~ length games, there is an insane amount that can be done no matter how long. Remember that when we talk about “150k words” that is the same length as Braum Stoker’s Dracula, when we say “500k words” that is the length of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The Grim Brothers told entire fairy tales within a few thousand words, not every story needs to be a Dracula or the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
1,177 - “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
2,615 - “Cinderella” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
58,164 - The Art of War by Sun Tzu
78,792 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone by J.K Rowling
99,500 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
100,609 - Ender’s Game by Orson Scott
198,227 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
587,287 - War and Peace by Leo Tolsky
My point isn’t that the playthrough length is 150k words, I’m trying to frame the scale of the things we are creating. I feel like it’s easy to forget just how big the projects we create are. Like, it’s genuinely insane to me that the entireLord of the Rings trilogy is smaller than a lot of the games being released here today. Also, I’d like to reinforce the idea that that brilliant things can be made within smaller form/delivery. Not every story needs to be a War and Peace.
I suppose that’s true in the same way a book’s thickness offers a vague idea of the length. Actually after a moment of reflection it’s a very apt comparison. I wouldn’t say it’s a ‘useless’ metric, and I never implied as much I don’t think. I merely meant to say it is not wholly descriptive of the experience the reader might have. If you managed to make a one million word game into a 10 minute experience I would be incredibly impressed.
I think it’s natural though. Interactive fiction isn’t just one story, it’s many stories running parallel to each other. It makes sense that you would end up with one game being as long as multiple traditional novels.
But I definitely agree that people can and do write compelling stories that are shorter. But a 150k word story isn’t functionally as long as Dracula because you have to consider there are multiple branches
It’s also not a completely unreasonable metric - I mean, I consider a book’s thickness when I ponder what to pick from the library, and it resembles that, as long as you have any kind of idea how the numbers would translate to pages.
Not to a player maybe, but it definitely is to the author who had to write all those words, and the player also paid for all those words even if they chose not to see all of them.
It’s not the author’s fault if the reader decided to read only half of their novella collection!
