Hello!
Always nice to see people coming over from Choice of Games. :)
For the purposes of the jam, whatever you submit should tell a complete story. If you can do that with a demo out of a larger piece, that’s fine! But generally speaking you shouldn’t submit the equivalent of “chapter 1” of a longer game, where the demo is clearly just the beginning of a bigger story.
1000 words is hard, for sure, especially if you have multiple different playthroughs (which you likely will, with ChoiceScript). Heck, it’s hard enough in non-interactive fiction.
But meeting the challenge of such a very small number of words is part of what makes the entries so interesting and innovative.
Just to clarify what the “1000 words” includes, any code or other assets that the reader never sees don’t count towards it. But every word of actual content–even if it only shows up in one particular branch–does count.
One trick that works for me when I write fiction of fewer than 1000 words is to get what’s essential to the story down first and fit anything else in after. I also tend to set myself limits before I start writing a particular scene.
If I were to apply the same to a piece of IF, I might end up with a rough outline like this:
First scene: A dark and stormy night. The narrator looks out a window and sees a dark shape on the cobblestones (50 words)
Second scene: …
And so on. Although it probably adds an extra step onto most people’s narrative design workflow, it will make hitting the wordcount a little easier.
Hello! Thanks for monitoring this board.
If, when the player goes back to follow a different path, they re-read some screens that remain the same, do we need to count those words more than once? Using your example, if a person had to reread the 50-word intro scene each time they play, and they play 5 times, does that count as 250 words against the total count? Or does word count only increase based on words new in that play-through?
If a scene appears multiple times, you only need to count its words once, so that intro scene would only count once.
What we count is unique words in unique passages, not ones that are the same in all playthroughs. :)
If you’re writing in twine, you can use the proofing function to get a relatively close count.
Also note that code doesn’t count. Only words that appear before the viewer.
I know it’s kind of a weird way of doing things… The main reason we use it is to make sure we pay what the SFWA considers pro fiction rates for games published in our magazine. (9 cents per word). In this case, it just helps define the challenge!
