As someone who wants to develop own game, I find myself curious how that actually works. Have no experience with presentations nor the ways to count mechanics, dialogue lines, etc. Would appreciate some help.
- Jan 28, 2025
- 30
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In a visual novel, for example, each update could be a chapter of your story. Each chapter could be something like 8k-10k words long (about 1h of content, so it's less likely that someone will complain about it being too short) and contain some h-scenes.
In other types of games, the number of h-scenes (interactive or not) might be the main aspect of each update and the number of them will depend on how long it takes you to build each one.
Ultimately, this will be a completely arbitrary decision on your part. Depending on the tools used during development, you can easily keep track of the amount of dialogues, scenes, etc.
In other types of games, the number of h-scenes (interactive or not) might be the main aspect of each update and the number of them will depend on how long it takes you to build each one.
Ultimately, this will be a completely arbitrary decision on your part. Depending on the tools used during development, you can easily keep track of the amount of dialogues, scenes, etc.
Last edited:
- Jul 4, 2017
- 2,760
- 5,149
There's no rules about it. And if you ask people, you will receive lots of conflicting opinions. It also depends on the game type, because a visual novel progresses differently to a RPG, and a mostly-linear story progression is different to a more open-world game with many quests.
Counting lines of dialogue, or number of renders, is not very useful because how many is "enough" is very relative to the game type. You might have a management simulation game with 10000s of lines of code and only small amounts of dialogue.
One common theme you see is a dev targetting a certain "unit" of storyline - a chapter of a VN for example. Or perhaps "a day" of a slice-of-life story.
The actual metric that matters to players feeling "satisfied" with the size of the update is going to be playtime - how much time did it take to go through all the new content. If you manage to produce 30 mins of new playtime every three months you will be WAAAAY ahead of the average.
Counting lines of dialogue, or number of renders, is not very useful because how many is "enough" is very relative to the game type. You might have a management simulation game with 10000s of lines of code and only small amounts of dialogue.
One common theme you see is a dev targetting a certain "unit" of storyline - a chapter of a VN for example. Or perhaps "a day" of a slice-of-life story.
The actual metric that matters to players feeling "satisfied" with the size of the update is going to be playtime - how much time did it take to go through all the new content. If you manage to produce 30 mins of new playtime every three months you will be WAAAAY ahead of the average.
To add onto prior answers, it's important to set milestones with tasks for your releases when developing them.
Organisational advantages aside, that way you already have a rough outline of how to present your updates in a readable format.
You could use GitHub (even with an empty repo) for that, or some specific software, or just a simple Google document or even pen and paper.
Organisational advantages aside, that way you already have a rough outline of how to present your updates in a readable format.
You could use GitHub (even with an empty repo) for that, or some specific software, or just a simple Google document or even pen and paper.