Thank you for the offer. I’m concerned that I wouldn’t know how to maintain and update a custom program over time, though. I’m wondering if an out-of-the-box solution might be best for someone as technically unskilled as me? Maybe I should try the free thing that comes with the new laptop first, along with a quality mic, and see if it’s sufficient.
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I was looking for famous quotes earlier today and this reminds me of one:
“In the theatre the audience want to be surprised - but by things that they expect.”–Tristan Bernard
I think if they are going to be a fairly major character I would have expected to see them somewhere by now, even if it was just a passing moment of recognition across the street. Chekhov’s gun sort of situation.
If they’re just serving a minor role I probably wouldn’t over emphasize their history, if it wasn’t important before, why is it now?
Edit: I am used to writing on the shorter side though, so Act 2 might be quite reasonable for something longer.
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I think it depends on what you mean by “showing up.” Are they actually mentioned at all, or do they just appear out of nowhere like a deus ex machina? It’s not a perfect comparison, but in Mass Effect, you see Saren three times throughout most of the game. In two of those, Shepard isn’t even on screen, and in the other, you’re only talking to him through a hologram. You don’t meet Saren face-to-face until about 75% of the way through, on Virmire. And yet, he still feels like a looming presence. What makes it work is that A) you’re constantly chasing him, and B) his actions and their consequences are everywhere, so you feel him even when he’s not on screen—because you’re always cleaning up his messes.
If we want an example closer to home, think Heroes Rise. You meet Prodigal only once in the entire book, and not again until the climax, excluding the Sparrow subplot. The point is, it can work as long as the villain’s presence is felt throughout the story in whatever way fits the narrative.
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I mean, there’s a reason they’re the MC’s ex-nemesis. The idea is that the MC’s team is stumped on a case, someone goes “hold on a minute, we know an expert”, and then they go and drag them out of retirement/something-akin-to witness protection (they’re not pleased).
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Just finished a section with three possible routes and am now bringing them all back together for the next scene. So, the first hour of my writing session today has basically been the ever-fun game of “what the hell was my logic? where might the MC be at this point?” etc. So I’m basically backtracking through a section, checking logic, and making sure the MC is where I think they are (and adding bits here and there to get them to the right place if they aren’t).
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Ah, something like The Expendables, then? Like retired heroes (or villains in your case) coming out of retirement for one last job?
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I’m not familiar with those, but from what I can see, something like that.
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Coming out of retirement is a tried-and-true trope, so I don’t see a problem with it. The only thing I’d recommend is planting a seed about the character early on, even in passing, otherwise it feels jarring if they just drop from the heavens with no setup.
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Turns out I was subconsciously thinking of my multidimensionally-displaced villain, so I’m going to need to explain a thing or two about that, too. 
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You’ve got a real knack for making your story sound alluring with the way you describe it. Hope I’m not setting myself up for disappointment, lol 
because it really does sound cool.
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Just remember I may be talking about multiple stories at the same time (or at least on different days), I can never focus on just one.
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I’ve always put the one with code and phrase it like
10,000 words (story+code)
I think a lot of readers who don’t try and write a game don’t realise how much extra work coding can be.
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I find it interesting different people’s approaches to publicising word counts.
On the one hand it’s a very important metric to describe the amount of work an author has put into it, and unlike seeing a physical book, gives a reader a rough idea of how long the work is. But code isn’t seen by the user and a code word count would be more a measure of complexity of the game, so could be more useful as a separate statistic.
On the other hand is this something that readers even care about (code that is)?
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I don’t think readers tend to think about code in terms of game size, but in general they assume that a higher wordcount = longer play experience. Which is often the case but not always.
I’ve stopped publicly talking about exact wordcounts for my WIPs because I don’t find it a very meaningful metric and prefer to focus on other aspects of the game, but I’m not in the majority in doing that.
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Something wordcount doesn’t quite capture – whether story alone or code + story – is efficiency. The blog article I shared before explain this with examples: Length and Coding Efficiency - Choice of Games LLC
For example, I have a bit that is 57 + 35 words (not including code; the 35 word bit is a variable so I could nest multireplaces) that holds 6 different versions of the text. If I separated them and wrote each one out on its own, it’d be 236 words (each version is 37 or 44 words long).
I like wordcount as a measure of progress. And story alone is what VSCode gives me and aligns better with the rules of an online writing community I’m in.
As for stories to read, while I might be wary of a very short story (unless I know the author is very efficient or skilled with shorter works), I have no special preference for a larger wordcount.
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Hey, everyone!
Been a bit since I posted, as I’ve been keeping my head down and toiling away on numerous projects.
That said, as of last night, The Frontier has reached 217k words with code, and 172k words without! We’re gearing up for a strong WiP launch release, and I plan on showing more off in the coming days and weeks as I come along on some gameplay loops.
Beyond that, I’ve added an extra 17k words to Estheria: A Realm Divided in the last few weeks of just writing, and have also been working on a subproject known as Character & Fitness, which is a legal thriller. Character & Fitness is currently at 26k words without code and building strong.
The Frontier currently remains my flagship project, and will be my primary focus especially once I reach WiP release stage with Update Zero. My goal is to push bimonthly updates with The Frontier that feature new content, expanded plotlines, or new mechanics. This kind of development approach allows me to slowly assemble the game alongside a community while garnering feedback instead of solely dropping colossal sized updates six months at a time.
Either way, I hope you’ve all had a fantastic month, so far!
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Word counts matter a lot when it comes to CS games, but I’d say that coding efficiency is less cared about. Polls have shown time and time again that a lot of people on this website seen not to want to touch games under 100-150k total, and believe that higher word count = always better. It has been brought up a number of times that playthrough length (which does not count code) with total count gives a better measure of replayability or coding efficiency (those two are hard to separate out by word counts alone), but it is a stat that will not be put on published games and has never really gained traction on the forums. So short answer, on the stores, you’re penalized for being efficient with your coding because the total wordcount drops as a results. Playthrough length is interesting to some players but does in general not seem to be seen as important as the total count.
Problem is that there’s no one good way to report stats for “true length” anyway. My first game was not coded very well. I was learning,and have repeated passages in places where things like gosub or other variables would have been far more efficient. If I had’ve written it today with exactly the same words but different coding, the total wordcount would likely be lower. If we removed code in the “second theoretical game” for a it’d be a lot lower due to all the extra code… But it’d still be essentially the same game, just coded differently. It can give you a rough idea, but the nature of HG means it’s going to be tricky to determine exactly what the coding efficiency is likely to be like without peeking at the code. For COG it’d likely be a bit more consistant due to the in progress editing. Although far from perfect, I think playthrough rather than total without code length is possibly a bit more useful, as it (imperfectly, but still the best measure we have) gives an idea about potential replayability.
Yes I agree but it is hard not to put wordcounts when everyone else is doing so and it’s almost expected. The only place where I’ve found people adding wordcounts to WIP games to be helpful is to judge update size. Like if a game has only had a small thousand words added to it going a few choices forward, I’m more likely to wait on a larger update than if they have added 10k to make best use of my time. But that could still easily be done descriptively with saying what the update is, ie “small update with some extra choices for x scene”, “new chapter added”, “bugfixes,” etc.
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For my bit on this, I do post word count and do not include the coding words in that word count, however, I usually round and dip down the number a bit as due to some less than aesthetically pleasing programming that causes some of my writing in these games to have some repetition . . . probably something for me to fix in editing or in the copy-edit phase at some point.
I’d agree strongly that word count can be a good metric for a rough estimate on how large an update is, though its not a perfect metric for the size or experience of a game. However, best I can figure, most other metrics fall short too. If we use lines of code as a metric, then programmers with more precise coding techniques will come up short, which is unfair. File size in terms of memory would have similar benefits and problems. Average play time might seem like a better metric, but even there it is going to vary wildly and probably has little link to player enjoyment. Some players are going to like different aspects of games, so probably one metric to fit all players just won’t cut it. For myself, I’d love a metric that would show me how many choices on average occur during a WIP and how often they occur (i.e. every page or once every 10 pages or so) . . . granted, some of these potential metrics are probably a lot easier than others. To my mind, probably having a few different metrics in plain sight for players might be optimal.
Interesting discussion. As with a lot of the discussions on here, I don’t think there is a single right answer for what to include or not to include when trying to project accurate expresions of WIP expansion.
The beauty to this is that someday you can write stories that bridge your different story worlds – or at least thats my tenative goal down the road.
Congrads on your progress! Sounds like these are really coming along.
For myself, for my midmonth review, I’ve had descent progress, though probably falling behind overall. I did manage to post Daughter of Elves to COGdemos, though for now that one is just a teaser with only most of the first chapter to show for it. Had descent progress on Blood & Blooms for the jam, but I need to snip scope creep and still maintain the story I want to present, which is always challenging. For Sense & Sorcery there has been descent progress, though far short of what I was hoping for. Still, half of september left, and while the last week I worked nearly every day, next week I have some time off, so hopefully I can get good progress on these chugging along and also get some real life stuff taken care of too.
Awesome writing to all!
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One of the reasons I keep working on multiple stories at the same time is that they take place in the same world already (well, multiverse aside), and this helps me to define it in a way that it stays consistent across different stories.
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There’s also The Weeping Gods that does this! It’s a cool reveal even without foreshadowing.
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