Forum rules - please read before posting.

Tips on "calculating" length of the game?

I´m in the middle of writing the script of my game and I have come to the point where I feel like I have to decide on how long the game should be. This however is very very hard to grasp and there are sooo many variables that has to be taken in concideration when calculating this and I might be asking for something impossible here, BUT do you guys have ÁNY sort of tips in how I should work with the length of the game? 

I want the game to be at least 2 hours long, I dont plan on any "impossible" 90´s puzzles, as a matter of fact I don´t plan on having to many puzzles at all, I´m making more of a interactive story in which the gameplay should be pretty fluent and not make the player get stuck for too long.

Again I know that there are no definitive answer to this but any sort of advice would be great!

Comments

  • No real tips to offer, but at least some thoughts on the matter:

    An interactive story without too many puzzles would require a quite substantial amount of content to last 2 hours - possibly one of the reasons those infamous puzzles were used so much in old games: they don't take up much storage space in a game that must be distributed on a floppy disk!

    It also depends on how interesting and detailed the game world in itself is for the player to explore. Some people like to just relax and walk around and look at stuff (but that obviously puts some heavy demands on the aesthetic qualities of the game), others prefer to just race through the game as fast as possible.

    During some early brain-storming sessions on my current project, we actually joked about having a timer running, and preventing players from proceeding beyond certain "choke points" until they'd played a certain amount of time! <:-P

    In the end we decided to include a number of turn-based combat scenes, which makes sense in the context of the plot, and should hopefully add some extra playing time without frustrating the player, the idea being that it's much more interesting to be making tactical decisions rather than trying to beat some old-school puzzle, that makes no sense even after you've solved it.

    Other than that, I think there's no real alternative to getting it into the hands of playtesters as early as possible and getting some estimates from that.
  • I totally get what you are saying and that is pretty much what is worrying me :D I really don´t know how to expand the length of the game so that it reaches around 2 hours. Maybe I have to consider adding more puzzles to make it more "playable" and extend on the time as well. 

    The thing with my game is that it really won´t be for everyone since it´s more of a interactive story of sorts but it will probably appeal to more players if there are more "stuff" to do. The problem is that I´m really just a "one man team" except for another guy who makes the music and sound and I aim pretty high when it comes both to the story and the look of the game... Then add to that that I don´t want to buy graphic-assets.. Doing it all by myself  :-B 

    Maybe aming for ~2 hours is a bit much for me? Another thing that has come in mind is to make an episode-based game where I write the beginning and the end, make the first episode and se what people think of it and then continue making episodes. Don´t really know how that would work with saves etc though?

    Having some kind of turn-based or quick-time events was a good idea, I´ll definitely look into that.
  • I've been considering the idea of episodes as well - and it's supported directly by AC, as described in section 9.7 in the manual.

    In fact ... talking about it now, I think I might actually go with the episode thing myself after all ... :-?
  • edited March 2016
    Yes I dove into the manual and found that it is actually supported so I think that pretty much seals the deal for me. I think it´s good for small developers to do episodes because you get a "product" out faster. And letting people play through the first episode will definitely give me some answers regarding how long it takes to play through it for different people.

    One of the challenges with this however is that you really have to make the first episode interresting so that the player wants to return. But I guess thats the case even if you make a "normal" game, if it´s not exciting to play the first 20minutes you always risk losing the player.

    Episode based it is! 
    :bz
Sign In or Register to comment.

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Welcome to the official forum for Adventure Creator.