Word Count - Just what is counted?

[Havenstone]

Good point. And as someone who only very slowly got comfortable with those tools myself over the course of a decade, I’d echo what I always say about coding efficiency:

@Havenstone

For non-programmers like me and others we’ve heard from upthread, it takes effort and time to use functions like gosub and multireplace–both in figuring out how to use them in the first place, and then in being able to read and check the code that results. There’s a real inefficiency there for anyone who doesn’t take naturally to computer code, manifesting in games that take longer to finish.

And ChoiceScript is meant to be a language for folks like us. That was the point, right? There were already plenty of ways for people with more programming nous and experience to write IF. The new thing about CS was that anyone could use it, even if they didn’t understand a scrap of the underlying software.

Many, many of my favorite ChoiceScript works are inefficiently coded. Their word count is still a decent indicator of how much story there is to explore; and as a non-editor player of these games, I’d rather see them finished and enjoyable with big chunks of repeated code than lagging because a non-programmer is trying to teach themself coding efficiency as they write.