AGS-made games length

[Gribbler]

I've searched the forums and looked in various FAQs but couldn't find anything. How do you determine game length in AGS database? How many gameplay hours make a game "short" or "medium". Is this even fixed?

[DoorKnobHandle]

IIRC 5 rooms or less indicates short, 20 or more is long. Of course these are super rough guidelines, you could easily have more then 5 rooms in a very short game. I think this info used to be on the AGS games page somewhere but was probably taken out. Potentially because room count is such a bad way of measuring game length.

[Igor Hardy]

All the game lengths are defined in the game database. Short is shorter than 30 minutes and medium is under one hour, although it's difficult for me to accept that a game longer than 1 hour is already a "full length" adventure game.

But don't ask me how they time it.

[m0ds]

Back in the heyday I'm sure a 'full length' point n click amounted to either 5+ hours gameplay or 100+ rooms. Certainly all the boxes I have make a point of just how many rooms there are.

[Radiant]

Very few Sierra games have over a hundred rooms though. This is easy to see if you play around with the debugger. I'm not aware of the AGS database having any "official" definition of what constitutes a certain length.

[Stupot]

100 rooms is a hell of a lot really.

I don't think you can judge game length in terms of just rooms.  There are loads of factors involves.  For one thing, it depends how much backtracking a game involves.. there could be a game with 20 rooms which all have a lot going on and lots of backtracking that takes 50 hours, vs a game that has very little backtracking through 100 rooms, (half of which are just there to look pretty and don't even have any object in) and takes 10 hours.

On the flip-side, judging length by time is also problematic.  Some games might have a lot of lengthy cut-scenes which beef up the time it takes to complete the game, but with relatively few rooms comapred to a game with lots of gameplay and no cutscenes.

[miguel]

Chapters?
Maybe its easier to tell that a game is a full length one if it has more than, let's say...4 chapters? Each in different locations?
It's very subjective.

[Gribbler]

Moreover, numer of hours needed to complete a game also depends on player's experience. One person can complete given game in 2 hours whereas another might need 4 or 5. What then? Is the game short for the first and medium for the latter?

[m0ds]

Yep, 100 room AGS games are few and far between...

I reckon it's something developer led rather than how players might play it. Actually it could fall on both providing they can just go through the game at its max pace. For example, there's a certain pace you can achieve even if you know the game inside out (as a developer would). For example, my game 11-11-11 no matter how fast I try and complete it I never achieve a time better than about 30 mins. The game plays out in that time as we are all familiar with in a point & click. No matter how quickly you solve the puzzles it's just not possible to shorten the experience beyond a certain point. So perhaps those timings aren't too bad. If you could play a game completely at its fastest possible pace, you would then probably feel as the 30 mins area around short and medium are perhaps quite fair settings. Does that make sense? My point is the absolute minimum time it takes to complete a game perhaps says something about its overall length.

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

What makes sense to me is to play through the game, completing all tasks and conversations, with the knowledge of the solutions. Time that. I don't believe many factor in the time naturally spent thinking and experimenting with solutions, just time moving through the game at a reasonable pace. When I look at game length when considering a game I'd feel ripped off it was not actual content and just a guess on how often I would get stumped.