Forums » The Lounge » Read Thread

Wasn't exactly sure which forum to post this on, but I was wondering if anybody knows how long (or short) a storygame needs to be to be considered a 1 in terms of play length? Is the length measured by words, letters, pages or a combination of the three?

Hmm... I'm curious if there's a way to measure whether a game is a 1 or not based on how many words or pages it has. Basically I was considering putting together a short project/competition type thing to try and see how good a story game can be and how highly it can be rated if it only has a length of 1, but first I'd need to know a way to calculate what the storygame's length is before it gets published. ^_^

What is a story game named that has a one anyway? Isn't 2 "So short, yo mamma thought it was a recipe."

"Make sure not to blink".

It has to take effort to make that short of a game.

It takes no effort usually.

It is usually an extremely crappy storygame that is that short.

A good one that short would take some large amount of effort.

That was sarcasm, but I agree with you. In my opinion this is one of the major problems with the internet. 

Yeah, that's why I thought it might be fun to try and see if it was possible to make a really good story game with a really limited amount of pages and words. ^_^

Well if you decide to try it, I wish you luck!

Cheat with scripting.

How?

I remember years ago someone saying they were thinking about doing a story which only used a single page through the use of scripting.

I’m guessing the scripting would just keep changing the page text with each new choice you made.

Yep, you would just have one page with a bunch of conditionals in its script.

Tempted to try it myself, but I'd require a much shorter story than my usual work.

Yeah, but I still wouldn't know what the game length was.

I wouldn't count anything by someone who used scripting to get around the length. Then it's really a contest for who can game the system most efficiently, not who can write a good story in a short space.

The length formula is secret, but like ogre says, 1 would be incredibly short. 

Just checking my own stories:

Snow, hell girl, and desperate heart are all 4, and haunted is actually a 5, and I'd consider all of those short.

Erika bakes a cake, which was for the 90 min contest, is still a 4. 

Kingmaker is a 3, and it's not actually a story, plus it only has about 2 sentences per page.

Even High school romance, which is terrible and only about 5 pages long, still gets a 2 for length.

In my totally non-scientific study of only stories I wrote myself XD, it seems like 4 is the spot for "still a very short story but capable of being good."

So I suppose if I were making a contest, I'd set it at 3 and below. No scripting. XD 

Nawh, making a really good game with a length of 3 would be easy. With a length of 1, I'm wondering if it's even possible 

Yeah anything I haven't published has a zero length.

Ah, that's interesting. Question is, can I be bothered to publish and unpublish a game over and over to figure out what variables make it a 1? 

Awh, this is interesting! So around 1500 words would make the game a 1. Now I just need to figure out how many pages it can be distributed over. ^_^

So I'm guessing a 22 page story with 18,150 words would be over 3 in length.

Just wondering since it was shortest story I wrote, though I have another one that is 32 pages, but only 9,792 words. Though the site marks that one as length 5.

Easy?!  :p

Okay, what're the judging criteria?

Uhh... I dunno. It wouldn't really be a competition with a winner, just a challenge to see how well a person could write with such a limited amount of text and pages. I guess how well a person did in said challenge would be shown in how well the story was rated.

I guess it wouldn't be a contest so much of a challenge. I'm thinking like the old challenges that Morgan did where people would see if they could write a decent game in an hour. With this challenge you'd have more time, but very limited words and pages.

And I can't really give people my points since I'm not an admin... I mean I guess I could give people points by deliberately losing duels to them, but then I'd risk losing my beautiful Lucky Dueler's trophy, and Mama's not letting nobody take her precious away ^_^

If you decide to do it, I'll give points.

Awh, now we have a challenge! ... But how to decide a winner? What if mor than one game is rated the same? 

I'd be interested in this. My own stories get ridiculously wordy (probably why I never finish anything lol) but of course less is more, and I've been curious before how the idea of flash fiction would work applied to a CYOA.

Sounds like there's have to be a limit to the amount of scripting allowed?

I"d started a game at one point that was meant to be played mostly from one screen, but it was mostly just me learning the basics of scripting with the idea of putting together a little turn based city sim.

Thanks Ogre, but you don't need to figure this all out for me, I can do it myself later. I mean if I do make this into a challenge, I wouldn't be able to do it for a little while anyway, so I've got loads of time to figure it out. ^_^

Unless it is progressive with set minimums for word count then after those minimums have been passed the links are used as a variable factor. this could make it potentially so small that it does not affect the shortest games, say 1-4 but comes more into play at the muh higher word counts and is more in effect for separating out the much longer games

I suppose you could cheat the word count by telling the story purely through pictures.

Or type out a page worth of text using the GIMP text brush on a blank background, save the image as a JPEG, find somewhere to host it, then <a href> it.

I'm not giving points for Kobayashi Maru solutions. XD

I dunno I feel like sufficiently clever workarounds should be rewarded in their own way.

Maybe you could send them a picture of some points?

haha.

But seriously: the point is "write a good story with few words," not "find a loophole so you can use all the words you want"

'bout two inches.

I thought this was going to be some existential question. 

Been doing some testing and finding results completely different to Ogres. I find that a storygame between 10 and 20 pages can only have about 300 words spread across it to be given a length of 1.

I just have to ask, why are you so interested in finding how much a 1 is?

I've already explained in the thread.

I think so. I'm finding extremely difficult to figure out what different factors effect it. I'm wondering if things like coloured text, backgrounds and using different fonts might have something to do with it.

Hah, that was funny, but my internet didn't allow me to watch the video, so I don't think it was good...

Are you actually publishing it, or just previewing it?

I actually did exactly the same, so I have no idea why it turned out different.

Now I'm curious too. Stand by, I'll run my own test.

edit: haha okay I'll be back in a couple of hours. It seems the site doesn't believe it's possible to create a 'good story' in less than 90 minutes. (Clearly bullshit as my ten copy and pasted paragraphs from A Tale of Two Cities is absolutely sublime, curse this site for doubting my talents!)

But now I want someone to run a 'write a story in under 90 minutes' contest.

@mizal:  Morgan did.

(Someone not on mobile/who,can see what they're doing add links?)

Bacon Wars, Erika Bakes a Cake, Dispiteous

All right, so my storygame of 10 pages with 100 words each and just a few short branches was counted as a 2 in length.

As I mentioned, I sampled paragraphs from A Tale of Two Cities, so it's possible character count does have something to do with it, like Ogre suggested.