Under either the Choice of Games label or Hosted Games label? Does anyone know? I’m just curious! Or if you don’t know the word count, what game has felt like the longest to you?
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One post claims Tin Star is 1.5 million words total - I know it is over 600,000 although each play-session felt perfect to me.
I know that the Zombie Exodus series is another with high word count increasing its playability and Infinity series is quite hefty too.
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I often wondered myself. How long does it takes to write those… half million words.
I mean, XoR is developed/worked for at least 1.5 yrs, IIRC.
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XoR is six years in development. I don’t think @AllenGies ever stated how long he worked on his; but I do know authors like JimD and Cataphrak have spent years planning and doing all the work on their series.
My project I’m writing for the contest is taking the full year and that is supossed to only be 100,000 words.
Other authors can knock out 50,000 words in a day - I can’t do anything like that, yet 
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Sorry, what’s XoR? XD
That stands for Choice of Rebels… the game that I most wish I’d gotten into the forum alpha while it was still up 
I guess there’s a beta coming up, though 
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OUW, what de ff… wut? Six years? O.o
Arg… Umm… Huh. I guess each author have their own pace, right?
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Havenstone is in Nepal, working every day on a “real” job, so the fact that he was able to do everything he did (and that his family let him) is amazing to me. This was dated August 2013:
I believe Vendetta’s Gangster project is as old, although his has not been updated in a bit; still active but private. Also Jeantown’s Guenevere is about the same age.
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I could never imagine having a WIP for like 6 years, but the benefit is that they will probably all be best-sellers.
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I think Magikiras is meant to be about 1.1million words as well.
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@Eiwynn - Eighteen months. That’s how long it took to write Tin Star from first words to publishing. It could have been longer but I phased in the research at intervals. For example, I didn’t need to know that much about the Trans-Continental railroad until later. There were two books I read concerning that.
I did retrofit a number of scenes because of playtester input and even developed filler content based on feed back and brainstorming with the same. They really helped and it is not overstating things to say that Tin Star wouldn’t exist without them. To this day, if there was time and brain space, I could dive back in and make changes because I couldn’t figure out everything beforehand.
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The dedication everyone shows is inspirational. Sounds corny but it does help knowing if you put in the work then you can succeed.
Did you have a closed beta test or an open or even both?
Ya, I loved the possibilities of your story all the way through there were possible divergences you left open for exploration. If you ever decide to do a sequel or another title, I’ll be a fangirl. lol.
I assume when Guen is done it’s going to be collectively huge.
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@Eiwynn I did an open beta. Any and all were welcome. It worked out pretty well. People contributed positively.
The only restriction I had was that, if you had a line of text you disagreed with or a bug you’d discovered, please record a snippet of the text exactly as written so that I could find it easily. There is, after all, only so much a writer can with ‘There are bugs in chapter one’.
But the big test was a public release. The public discovered flaws or instituted crashes in a myriad of unusual ways. Sometimes variables were accidentally reset or had odd interactions. Other times certain test were forgotten which changed options, and so at certain points departed characters briefly returned.
Likewise, there is only so much reading you can do before you have to start writing. Your writing will then inform you where you need to do more research.
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heck ya. I can get into a blizzard of research and keep putting off writing in name of that research, spending lots of effort and time… then when I finally do start writing I find I missed something that makes some of that research unnecessary but needed at another point.
Thank you for sharing your experiences.
Edit: I am a slow writer too, it seems. bleh.
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