Fundbetter: Qs 4-6

So, tackling three again here because these are easier (for me.) My planning and state of preperation is different than yours. So. Don't panic if you're no where near the point I am. As the application says, if what you have is legal paper with doodles, that's what you have. And it's better than nothing! Also keep in mind I'm at the beginning of development. What you see here is subject to change!

4. Vaguely what the game’s going to look like. This doesn’t have to be a screenshot. It can be a photo of the UI sketched on A4 paper. But we want to know you have a rough idea of the shape of the thing.

The general idea is to create a story like a scrap book. Clippings and old Polaroid and hand written notes all bound together in a beat up leather notebook. Characters are edited photos. Scenes, likewise, photographs through filters to age or distort them. Below are some photos and a short video showing how the notebook and the story scenes work together.

And that's where I am with that!

5. How long will the player take to complete one run-through? roughly.

This could be tricky for you. It's probably tricky for me too, but I think demonstrating an awareness of timing is the important point here. I think a lot of us sit down at Twine or whatever game engine we're working on without even once considering how much time we're going to spend behind the screen versus how much time we're asking our players to give over to our game. Will you audience sit down for an 800 hour RPG style game? How many hours of development will that take? (Great Cat in the sky.) Will it last longer than twenty minutes? Is their replay? Are players free to set it down and come back whenever they please, or are they locked in to play until you're finished with them?

Now, I'm coming at this from the point of a writer, the script/story is already mostly written in novel format. I obsess over word counts and outline down to the hundred words in some cases. Those details matter to me. So I have a vague idea of what I'm getting into. You could also compare your game in development to other games you've spent time on, play it through, count, and guess from there? (If you have a better suggestion here, let me know.)

Anyway, here's my answer.

I'm working from a drafted novel, so I know the word count will be somewhere around 60 thousand words. Reading times seem to be similar between the text only form and the game format, but I'll err on the side of slower reading to gauge the time here.

That said, reading a novel that's about 60 thousand words long at 200 words per minute, it would take a bit under eight hours to play beginning to end. (I think 250 is sort of average. I read at about 266 words per minute.) With each scene the game will update so players can set the game down as they complete scenes and come back to it later.

6. How’s it going to end? It’s OK not to have nailed down the ending; but we need to see you have a good idea of where you’re going.

Only you can answer this, and you may be tempted to answer with 'I don't know! tehe!' but don't! For goodness sake have a firm idea of how and when the game ends (or how specifically it doesn't end if you're doing a sandbox thing. Which is really complicated, but basically, 'your character can keep doing x y and z forever after the story line concludes' is a good start.) I have to imagine that a story and game that specifically end are probably a better way to go for the sake of Fundbetter, but that's a choice you have to make.

Here's my answer:

The game ends when the story is completed, when the player had read through all the scraps and scenes that this lost notebook has to offer. They should have experienced the main story line, the story of a pair of sisters hunting monsters inside themselves and out. They should also have experienced the meta story, most or all of a special message from a mother to her daughters long after her death. A message to the player as well. Or, to look it another way, when 65 or so of 65 or so scenes/artifacts have been revealed in the notebook and the player has read everything they wish to read of it.