I love this game and really do admire L&P's unwavering commitment to the highest quality output. But, the question about development time does need to be addressed if for no other reason than I can't see how this single story justifies 5-10 years of their time. I mean, as good as this game is, it's not exactly Anna Karenina.
Based on the last few pages of comments it's pretty clear that the leading contributor to the long development time is the length of the script - it's clear from the DEV and Patreon supporters' comments above that just about every line of dialogue gets its own render - which is totally justified from L&P's perspective and, from my perspective, combines fantastically with the quality of the visual elements to elevate it far beyond a huge percentage of the otherwise pretty good, and even really good, games we see on this site and elsewhere.
But, 43 pages of MS Word document if I recall, just for this partial-day update? This is a clear sign that a good editor is needed to reduce the meandering dialogue.
Gone with the Wind runs 3 hrs 45 min, script is 183 pages.
Gandhi runs 3 hrs 11 min, script is 181 pages.
The Godfather runs 2 hrs 58 mins, originally 171 pages edited down to 163 pages.
Putting aside personal taste, there's no credible case to be made that these movies don't have a lot of fully developed characters, ample back story and attention to setting, multiple characters with their own motivations and ambitions, mystery/intrigue/plot twists, a couple of surprises along the way, and PLENTY of detail, subtlety and nuance.
Even if you add 65% to account for multiple branching paths, any one of these epic tales would have a script running not much more than 300 pages.
Taking a more episodic example, the published scripts for two seasons of Fleabag: 12 episodes; six hours of on-screen content; number of pages: 405. Again, adding 65% for multiple paths, yields a total length of ~675 pages. Like most 30-minute shows, episodes are a mix of small event/scenes, medium event/scenes, long event/scenes, sometimes having one really big event/scene with fewer short/medium scenes.
Even using an hour-long television drama as a template, the script length per episode is roughly 45 pages. Adding 65% for branching stories is approaching 75 pages.
Multiplying it out, 75 pages x 25 episodes = 1875 script pages. Divide that by 30 playable days = 62.5 pages per playable day.
The question L&P (and all of us) should ask is, are these 30 playable days going to add up to anything even close to the content of 25 episodes of a traditional 1-hour long television drama? Never mind that the very excellent Anna Karenina movie from 2012 had a particularly dense script, at 208 pages (345 with branching add-ons) for 2 hrs 11 minute runtime.
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