I don’t know what authors nowadays use to write their stories but I feel like most applications dedicated to writing would have something like a word count embedded into them, I know Office Word has it. Would that solve the problem? Or are you saying authors here write their entire stories with the code already embedded into it?
Yes, I’ve used word to word count my chapters. Problem is I usually code and write as I go, so it’s time consuming to word count everything and then go back and manually count all the code. Could be done, but very time consuming and easy to miscount unless you’re careful.
Found the other link for anyone interested: Word count vs branching
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If you want good reviews from everyone; forget it. There are are people who hate storeys just because they cost some cash, even if it is stated that game contains in app purchases. And it is hard to write cyoa games without any rushed ending, and as everyone have said some people are not into replaying including myself, reading same scenes again and again is booring. What I do is skip content which I already have read and read the new ones and see diffrent endings, which is not fun. People buy thinking that the game would be long but they get a more replayable game. It will better to state minimum and maximum word count.
Another problem is some people like long game while many people don’t like linear games. So one have to maintain balance. Which is hard. Choice of robots and study in steampunk have done excellent job in maintaining that balance.
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@IvoryOwl
Your complaint about coding being included in the word count doesn’t make any sense. There’s no sane way to exclude that from the word count and doing so would take a massive amount of annoying work for zero gain. And as far as I know, coding as you go along is the only thing that makes sense, too. Anything else would be overly complicated and unnecessary. Plus, the code probably only accounts for roughly 5% of the word count, though it probably depends on the individual stories.
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Don’t forget you can now find out an average via Randomtest 
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Yeah, I love that function. But that’s just for the playthroughts, not solely the coding, right?
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Yeah. But it does allow us to get a count separate to the the total with a code.
I think it’d be better overall to have both total word count and an average playthrough as it would let people see the replayability in it.
I.e Super Duper Game is 300,000 words of text and code with an an average playthrough of 50,000 words. - it highlights the replayability.
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Oh, cool, I didn’t know that!
For sure! I’ve been putting that in the descriptions of my games recently. Like for Foundation of Nightmares, a couple of the bullet points were:
- 100k words total
- 40k words per playthrough
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Yeah you run 100 iterations of Randomtest with the show full text option ticked. The at the end it gives you a chance or count then you you just move the decimal point. To get the average. @Fiogan was the one who suggested this method.
I did it before running 1 iteration at a time and Randomtest gives you the count of that single playthrough and did that 10 times. Their method is a lot better I think 
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Oh, yeah, I do that all the time. It’s a super useful tool. I just hadn’t realized it excluded code. So I guess that means it gives a very accurate assessment of how many words readers actually see per play through!
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No its veeery easy. CSIDE shows word count with and without code. There is no aditional work, just two clicks to see that.
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What on earth is CSIDE?
Google gives me rappers, pools or support for bowel cancer patients…
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The best tool to write choicescript games ^^
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Thanks, maybe I will try that out for my next game… I’m still old school notepad++
Hmm wouldn’t oldchool be considered as notepad? 
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@Samuel_H_Young
I’m sorry but it does make sense, whether or not you’re willing to take that extra work is another matter. My solution to that problem would be to use different colors to delineate what is code and what is normal text (anything not written within coding parameters) and at the end verify the amount of words within each section. Alas, this is something that would have to be suggested to the code developers because its seems its not a feature already.
I never coded a CoG game but if its anything like HTML or BBC then coding is usually writen within < > or so the same logic could, in theory, apply here. The exception being image files but I think we don’t need to worry about that given the nature of these games.
EDIT: Since people have suggested applications that can easily separate the code from the text, I assume the issue is resolved then? 
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CSIDE while awesome has only been publicly released so not everyone would know about it.
But, @Samuel_H_Young I would recommend it if you don’t already use it.
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Oh, sounds like I was wrong!
One thing that will immediately make me dislike a game is short length with the promise of several sequels to come. After some experience, my initial interpretation of these games has become that the story will be deliberately unsatisfying on it’s own.
This impression is partly created by CoG stories but not limited to them. It is reinforced and strengthened by books and especially movies, where it is often a blatant cash grab that weakens the whole.
Word count is an abirtrary measure of length at best. A nicely coded game can reduce the word count significantly, and a very-efficiently-coded game even more so. Inefficient code (large blocks that are copy/pasted), can inflate wordcount falsely.
Because of this, I agree that including code is fair, since it will add to the reading length, if done properly, but that the full wordcount is not always the best measure.
And that’s without thinking about branching vs word count which changes things yet again:
Ultimately, it’s still good to know. Hearing that a game is 20k, or 100k, or 500k will still give you an idea of the length of the game, but it’s only one, small, inaccurate measure. 
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