I Joined the forum recently and I am trying to make my first game but I was curious about some things like
-When to puplish my WIP (like how many words I need to reach) ?
-How many words does an average writer add to his game weekly or monthly ?
I know it all depends on the writer and it defers from one to another but I wanted to know what is considered normal or the average of games
There is really no good answer to either of these questions, but I will tell you what I have done.
For a WIP, I waited until I had about nine chapters written which at the time was about 62k words or so. I was also looking for start getting feedback early, that way I could make modifications as soon as possible as opposed to dropping 100k+ words to find out that I needed to rewrite 75% of it.
These days I might start back even sooner, but I am not sure how well I would have held people’s attention with a short demo.
I also made sure to test it as riggerous as I could before posting the WIP and even then issues were found.
As for words per month, at the beginning I was maybe 1k-2k per month at the beginning. Once I got into a flow I was more like 30k for a few months straight. But I will sometimes force myself to meet the hard goals, which is not for everyone.
While publishing with Hosted Games requires 50k min, I’d guess that most are over 100k. I’m sure someone else will have the real numbers for that.
There is no average, not in any way that’s meaningful.
There is no minimum word requirement for uploading a WIP. Some writers upload when they have only a few pages of their story finished. Some prefer to have at least the first chapter. Occasionally someone won’t post at all until they have a finished draft.
(If you’re talking about submitting your game to Hosted Games for publication, the minimum word requirement is 30K. But there’s no minimum to post a WIP somewhere like DashingDon and make a post here linking to it.)
How much a writer is able to do in a given period of time depends on how quickly they write, how comfortable they are with the coding aspect of things, and how much time they actually have to spend writing. Some update regularly. Some go months between updates.
What I recommend for you at this point is not to worry about what’s average. Don’t set goals for yourself based on what other writers do, set your goals based on what you’re comfortable with, what you enjoy, what you feel is conducive to doing your best work.
It’s 30K, unless they’ve changed something in the last few months.
That’s accurate, especially recently.