Hey folks,
I am working on a game and some scene SEGMENTS (not scenes, sorry for the mistake earlier) are a bit lengthy; (20-25 lines until the page break) in the browser (storyline demands it). Is there any problem with lengthy scene segments? (maybe while viewing in android devices?)
I am just getting started and wish to know if my current scene segment length is large. Hate to trim after story completion.
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I think long paragraphs can be more troubling than long pages, but it’s partly preference. Would page breaks be a problem if you have more than, say, five to ten paragraphs? Especially longer paragraphs?
What I’ve done personally, before I had access to a smaller device to test it out, was to test my game in a small window I’d resized on my laptop to be about the size of a phone screen. It helped me to have some idea of how much scrolling I’d be forcing my readers to do.
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With my story I didn’t really focus on page breaks during the first draft of the demo, then when people made comments that it could use more I just added them where it seemed right. I don’t think there is a max length of a story, I mean Guenevere is going to be ginormous by the time that’s complete.
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As for scenes themselves, they can go on indefinitely, as far as I know. Personally I try to keep mine around 1000-2000 lines, just so when I add things later the scene length doesn’t get ridiculous and I don’t tie myself into knots. (I convinced myself it was a bad idea when I ended up with a 11,000 line scene, which was a bit much for me.)
I’m not sure what a typical number of lines per scene is, though, for other ChoiceScript-writing folk.
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I guess my 21,000 line scene is a bit much…
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It’s s a GIANT WALL OF TEXT IN MY MOBILE IS WOW LIKE CHINA WALL… But in your game is ok @Havenstone
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I meant between scenes (a window/ a segment / until the ‘NEXT’), not the entire game…dear god! 
I know Novels are pretty high in terms of line number and words.
No, no he has scenes of 21,000 words game is far longer than that. And chunks of several thousand words I read him in mobiles so I could tell you.
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Word and line count for my (finally nearly complete!) game:
Scene 1: 21,633 words, 2919 lines
Scene 2: 66,535 words, 5393 lines
Scene 3: 180,318 words, 21637 lines
Scene 4 (sort of an annex to scene 3): 21,008 words, 1985 lines
Scene 5: 67,467 words, 6781 lines
Scene 6: 87,189 words, 8288 lines
Scene 7 (final, and almost done): 91,032 words, 10520 lines… and counting.
Plus there’s a codex in the stats screen and some save scenes that add lines without much content.
All of that includes code as well as text, of course. Lots of code. But, yeah, there’s a reason it’s taken me almost six years. 
As far as scene segments go, I try to keep the paragraphs short and not too many paras before a page break… not sure I could give you an ideal line number, though.
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Awesome! And how many lines, on average, between each scene segment (until the pagebreak)?
Not easily calculated, I’m afraid. You could have a look and see: Choice of Rebels Part 1 WIP thread
Thank you for posting your rundown; it was instructive. Do you know what an average play-through length is for Rebels (and if so, would you mind sharing)?
And now I’m wondering if I partly don’t prefer really long scene files because of editing. It’s an interesting feeling to get a scene manuscript that’s as long as two novels…
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I’m Quicktesting the final draft now, in between writing the last few scenes. When I’ve got it fully QT-compliant, I’ll run Randomtest and let you know what the average playthrough length is…
Can I just say that while I’m quite proud of it, it puts the 1-million word achievement that is Tin Star into proper perspective for me. How on earth Allen Gies did it I don’t know.
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You’ve got to account for all the "hum"s and "hah"s a human player will make getting confused by all the math, of course.
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Mind if I ask which project this lengthy marvel of yours is? Oh- wait. Choice of Rebels? It’s done?!
But you undoubtedly will, since I’m betting you that with all the divergent possibilities inherent in XoR you will break that threshold yourself in one of the sequels. 
BTW does misses Havenstone have an opinion of the game, other than pride and liking the extra coffee money it’s going to net you guys?