Game length, wordcount and what to cut. (And other general questions)

Authoring General Design Discussions
21

I’ll add another hint that Ryan Veeder taught me (he wrote in a blog and I read it, not like he personally mentored me…)

  • Don’t mention superfluous extra stuff in your descriptions that you’ll then need to implement as it serves to distract the player from what’s important.

Thorough implementation is a noble cause. But thorough implementation can just be assuring the player “Yes, it’s there; you don’t need to mess with it.”

Just because you have a bathroom, and you and the player know what all should be in a bathroom doesn’t mean you need to spend hours implementing everything a bathroom has unless vital to the plot - like there’s a puzzle where a player has to fish a key out of the drain with string and bubble gum. If the player is just walking past it “Ah. Yes. It’s a normal bathroom. Nothing special you need there.”

Better yet don’t include a bathroom or any other unnecessary locations just for completeness or fall victim to scenery clutter. Extra stuff that’s in a game but not relevant creates inadvertent red-herrings for the player to get hung up on. If you don’t include it, it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t distract.

My version of this is “Don’t describe the wallpaper (unless the wallpaper is important.)”

This is less relevant in a choice narrative where the author can choose exactly what the player can do and/or focus on, thus allowing the author more descriptive leeway without the need for implementing stuff.

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22

While i’m also an adherent to the principle of Chechkov’s gun, well… i’m working on it by implementing a game where everything vaguely mentioned has an explicit purpose! Or at least, trying to, i suppose last minute playtesting is going to tell me if i’m being dumb.

I am trying to keep both locations and descriptions to a happy -ish. Elaborate yes, but the actual visuals are going to be limited around interactive items. As an example, and perhaps, a slightly problematic one…

The automatic look action describes the room. Which makes mention of some trees and birds. Examining the trees and birds points to the sky, which in turn points to a spoiler entity which finally gives a cookie point affecting the ending. And this is all assuming the player will want to interact further! I’m going to add some hyperlinks to the actions directly, but i’m now somewhat unsure whether or not that is a sensible approach.

The only author-induced hand of god i have so far is a forced interaction, and a single “wait, you haven’t done this super obvious thing” directly related to the interaction. I don’t quite want to limit the player into a forced state beyond vaguely pointing them at a direction.

Again, not sure if that’s a good thing! As it stands i do have planned endgame states that assume the player has done virtually nothing except blindly stumble across the map until the end flag is reached. Not much of a game, if played as such, but it’s an option. I really don’t want to limit my endings, i barely have 6 :pensive:

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23

If you do this, do one of two things (or both). Either include a unique searchable and repeated keyphrase next to each placeholder, something that won’t be used in your game (like Bitcoinisdumb), so you can search your source later to confirm you haven’t left any “describe pretty lady here” bits in your finished game -or- keep a running list somewhere of each time you rough out a section that requires you to double back and finish it later.

Now I have a mental image of Hanon running through a swamp with Veeder perched on his shoulders like Yoda.

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24

Oops :grinning:

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25

TODO is the common one I used! And that’s a great suggestion. It’s also good when you go “I need to rewrite this” and you remember to avoid the Chapter One Inward Death Spiral - just put TODO (fix this so it doesn’t suck) there and come back later.

You… :face_with_monocle:

Screenshot_20230319-230413_Chrome
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26

:joy:

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I use [zork] as my placeholder. It’s only in my game twice, so it’s fine. I don’t think I’ll be able to use it in my second game, sadly.

I would like to advocate for messy games. We all enjoy games that give a feeling of freedom while playing like an open sluice. There are so many great games in that mold that they can be mistaken for law.

In writing studies, my peers and I often used the term “oversanded” to characterize a work that had no objectionable qualities, but perhaps lacked personality as a consequence. The rough parts were gone, but the work was frictionless. It’s nice to get caught in the scenery sometimes or try to learn about a protagonist by reading about their takes on refrigerators or mailboxes.

I think it is good to keep things clean, but it’s also fine (good, even) to leave some burrs and catches. It’s OK.

fist bump

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28

I have multiple (commented) placeholders:

#CONTINUE means “I had to go to bed or do something else at this point, carry on from here next time”
#TODO means “I couldn’t be bothered to flesh out this bit and will come back to it when I have some inspiration or when momentum is less of an issue”
#LEARN means "I don’t know how to do this and will find out before going back to it
#LEARNED means “I learned how to do this and am putting this here so I can remember how much I’ve progressed”

The first two get removed when done, so there’s only ever one #CONTINUE if I’m doing my job correctly. There can be and often are several #TODO tags.

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29

So true. This works for people in real life too, although it might elicit some frowning of eyebrows if your first question when meeting someone new is:

“So, what’s your take on mailboxes? Any colour preferences? And should they have padlocks?”

Best to ease the topic into the conversation. By referring to your upcoming front yard redecoration perhaps… And those kinky garden gnomes you saw in the shop just the other day.

Wait…

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30

Yes, I agree. I would say, “Don’t cut it. Slice it.”

It’s not about how large the world is, it’s how it invites the player to play.
So try to maintain a consistent rhythm. Be critical of every scene, and make sure there’s no cruft in the prose. Refine each sentiment. Revise every phrase.

Try to achieve a musicality to the player experience. That may mean that each location description is only 15 words. But if it’s consistent, it establishes a mood all of its own. Then for effect you can break that mood. Then get it back again.

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31

I admit i struggle with that; My prose tends to be heavy and dramatic, while my characters by themselves are anything but. At some point i lose sight of what my original intent with the mood was, (having rewritten a simple description fifteen times) and i just look at the prose “Well, that’s a nice bit of writing, but what did it look like at first?”

I’m worried about slicing too thin and turning my steak into pastrami.

Past that, i’ve halfway convinced myself that a whole load of failure states, -clearly stated at least-, are ok, and it’s up to the player to face consequence. There’s only so much handholding that i can tolerate before the interactive adjective would lose its meaning.

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32

This reminds of a choice line from the game Death of Schlig:

“You attempt to slice the world’s thinnest slice of ham. With atom-splitting precision, you gently push the ham towards the spinning blades.”

-Wade

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33

Let me cut to the chase:

  1. Forget about word count. It’s pretty meaningless in a parser-based game. Other factors like number of rooms, number of objects (including scenery), number of puzzles, minimum number of moves to solve it and playing time are more meaningful measures of size.
  2. It sounds like you’re bogged down in technology, rather than the game itself. It shouldn’t be this way.
  3. Reading between the lines, it sounds like your game has breadth, but not depth. You might need to address that.

TALK TO is not superfluous. I advise players to use TALK TO when they first meet a new character. (Think of it as striking up a conversation with a character when you have nothing specific to talk about.) Take note of the key words in the character’s responses and then you can ask them about something more specific. You can also ask them about other objects, events or characters in the game. (Think of it like a detective questioning a suspect to gain more information.) This has always worked well for me.

EDIT: I deleted my points regarding Spring Thing. Reading back through the post, you never mentioned Spring Thing, so I’m not sure where I got that idea from.

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34

This is good advice. Really good advice.

I wrote Igor’s Quest for the Adventuron Treasure Hunt Jam 2020. Under the rules of the jam, it had to use two-word input, two-word room descriptions and two-word object descriptions. I even opted for the optional two-word responses (rather than six words). Despite these very harsh restrictions, by very careful use of words, the game has character, the player character has a personality, the story is clear and it’s funny. It is one of my favourite games.

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35

Being bogged down by technology is unfortunately an expected consequence. You are right about the SpringThing, and i did mention (somewhere at any rate) that i’m obliged to enter the game into a competition as part of my thesis requirement. Ideally i would push it back for a while, as the actual implementation phase has been going on for a week or two - at best!

I would also argue that i have the opposite problem. Instead of conceptual breadth, the game has, erm, pitfalls of content. The player can very well ignore every single attempted interaction by anything; every single description or hint or nudge or otherwise, and waltz to the end condition. Hence a “play through “ to winning (ending the game, at least) could be as short as 10? 11commands? Less, depending on the final room bloat- and whether or not the player chooses to walk off of a proverbial cliff. You can see why the question of “length” bothered me at that realisation.

That was exactly my intention as well with the use of both Talk To for a dialogue menu -and- the ability to ask or tell about for further information. Detective questioning a subject gives me some really nice ideas, however, so i appreciate the input!

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36

This sounds like a reoccurring issue often referred to as something like hidden content. Sometimes this gets as extreme as a game within a game that maybe 1 in a 100 players, or even less, will ever see. There’s two opposing schools of thought here and I find myself oscillating between both.

Content pits (not a bad name, btw) can really enrich a player’s experience… if they find it.

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37

I have always thought that it is a nice practice to reward curious players. Despite the demands of our fast-paced world, they’re still around!

If you implement an in-game hint system (those are nice), you can always include a section on obscure, “did you know,” or outright hidden parts of your game.

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38

Like Drew, I love rewarding the curious player, but I think I try to do this more on a level of providing interesting/amusing responses for a whole lot of less obvious commands, than to plan a whole subplot or deeply implemented interactive mechanic that potentially 9 of 10 players may never find. I might write a paragraph or two for a wacky player/sidekick death though…

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39

Yes. I call that “frosting” like the last thing you do on a cake; It’s most productively done when your game is functional and playable and you want to make it better. It’s understandably difficult not to follow interesting and amusing tangents while you’re building your game, but as you do this you learn (as I think I said before) you don’t want to frost the cake or paint the house until it’s fully assembled!

Again, it’s hard to resist, but expend your creative energy getting the thing working and then add flourishes later.

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40

Building up on this, the state of the game on release for the springthing comp is at ~28k words.

Taking away a generous estimate of 5k words for setup code and comments of bamboozlement as to why-doesn’t-this-work, i’m looking at 23k words. Ish.

Answering my own questions, if only to contrast the experience of frenetic development.

Length is an iffy matter. I listed the game as full length, but that’s purely due to forced “roadblocks”, also known as puzzles, but not really. (a.k.a, please actually read the game and not powerskip through everything, i worked hard on these words and look, pretty pictures.) So still no answer there; My wife took almost two hours to go through everything, a buddy was done in thirty minutes. Problematic, but it is what it is.

Sacrifices! This one was spicy, as they only happened due to time constraints i’m hoping my next projects won’t have. I did keep an obscene amount of checks for silly commands, and unsurprisingly, my wife tried defenestrate.
It was a pleasant surprise to realise that virtually everything i wanted to implement, was doable. Having time. :melting_face:

Population! I actually played with this a fair bit. Some locations had layered pitfalls of content, as in a mention, of a mention, of a mention… Others had a singular innocuous looking hole that ended up going on for… 2k words? I love me some prose ambushes. None of the rooms feel empty, but again, that is entirely up to whether or not the player will er, catch the bait.

Thanks for the active help, everyone, and i’m looking forward to participating in further comps without this stress of time.

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