How to build things with StoryNexus
Word count?
Eudoxia
Posts: 13
10/7/2012
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Hi everyone! So I'm going to be writing a StoryNexus game for Nanowrimo (whee!) and I was wondering how to estimate the size of the game & track my progress. I'm looking to write 20-25 thousand words (which, in my mind, is equivalent to Cabinet Noir, Bronze (by Emily Short) or the first performance or two of the Night Circus). My questions are:
1) Are my estimates accurate? What's the word count of a Cabinet-Noir-size game? What does a 25k-word game look like? I know that when FBG talks about Fallen London's word count, I'm always surprised at how big it is.
2) Is this size too ambitious? I've written text-games before (Inform 7, holla) and know my way around the SN tools - so the issue boils down to whether it's realistic to write, implement, & debug ~850 words per day.
Thanks!
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ebz profile: Eudoxia. Lookit my progress on the path to riches!
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
10/7/2012
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Cabinet Noir is somewhere north of 40K words. It's easy to underestimate word counts, in part because many branches have more than one outcome, and that adds up.
Internally, we always find it more effective to track game size and progress in number of both storylets and branches (because a 6-branch slet is a very different beast from a 2-branch slet), rather than words.
I'd suggest you work for 2-3 days and count the number of both storylets and branches you've managed then - and extrapolate from there for future progress. BUT you will want to reserve time for playtesting, sub-editing and debugging - I would suggest anything from 25% to 50% of the original production time, but it depends on how you work.
(We will ultimately be adding analytics to let you see number of storylets and branches - and probably words - but not for a little while.)
EDIT: clarity
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 10/7/2012
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+1
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Eudoxia
Posts: 13
10/9/2012
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Wow, I was not expecting Cabinet Noir to be that big! Guess I better scale back then. Since Nano is traditionally a 50k-word novel, I was thinking of writing 25k words and using the other 50% for implementing & testing, so that sounds about right. And that's exciting to hear of the future analytics too  Thanks so much!
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ebz profile: Eudoxia. Lookit my progress on the path to riches!
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