About wordcount rules, I've thought of an idea and I'm not sure how to count the words in a way that best fits the spirit of the jam.
Basically, there will be dynamic parts of the story that get filled by prompts. Eg. Starting the game with "You are [NAME], a [TITLE] of the [ORGANISATION]"
The idea is I'd have a prewritten list of words to fill in mad libs style. The user can reroll to get different sets of results until they find one they like. Potentially, I might even allow the text to be user edited, so it could roll you this result "You are Lloyd, a Captain of the Alliance" and the player might like most of that, but edit "Alliance" to "Federation".
The closest approximation feels like the text of branching choices, where each option does contribute to word count. But for the sake of clarification I'm confirming.
The sentence "You are ____, a ______ of the ______" is 6 words before the 3 blanks are filled. A filled sentence would be 9 words. Let's say, I had 5 names, 5 titles, and 5 organisations, in that case I would technically have to count this as 6 + 15, so 21 words, right? (in practice I'd be re-using lists of words for an economy of word usage, but just using a simple example here)
So my gut tells me, I would want to count this as 21 words, not 9. But please correct me if it makes more sense to count it as 9!
As a follow up, I assume that any user entered text would not contribute to word count. eg. if someone wrote in The Divided Galactic States for Organisation, that presumably doesn't affect my actual word count since it's being added to the game not by myself.