Relative length of adventure games

[CaptainD]

I was wondering if anyone knew of a source of information regarding the number of locations and characters in adventure games?  I've tried to find something but been unable to.  I'm interested in for instance how many locations some of the great Golden Age adventure games such as Zak McKraken, The Dig and SoMI had.  Also newer games - and how this related to the games' estimated playing time.

If anyone knows if such a source I'd be grateful if you could post the link; on the other hand, if you've made an adventure game (commercial of Freeware, I don't mind), or been obsessive enough to actually play through a game keeping a record of the number of locations / characters, I'd be interested.  (Partly I want to use this to estimate the overall playing time of the games I'm working on, but I'm kind of just interested in a general sense as well!)

[Radiant]

Actually, yes, I am that obsessive

(it helps that AGS has a menu option that shows you most of this data just like that)

[Babar]

If you have the games in question, you can use Scumm rev 3 to check the total BGs (including some weird unincluded BGs) and costrip ti check the characters and animations in LucasArts games, and Scistudio to check the charcters and backgrounds in Sierra games.

[CaptainD]

Actually, yes, I am that obsessive

Hurrah for OCD! 

Radiant can I just ask you, with your Locations count, are they all playable locations or might some of those be rooms for cut scenes etc?

[Vince Twelve]

Cool table Radiant!

I'll share this again, because I like it.   Resonance's stats:



Some other stats:

Rooms: 77
Lines of code (including white space and commented out lines because I can't be arsed to figure it out otherwise): 106368 (ish)
Lines of recorded speech: 5167
Non-speech Audio tracks (sound fx and music): 304

Gameplay time is tricky to estimate, but I think the game should be around ten hours on a first playthrough.

Rooms and sprite count probably don't strongly correlate with gameplay length, though.  It depends on how densely a game is designed.  Radiant's Warthogs, for example, I remember as a pretty dense game, with lots going on on every screen and reuse of all the rooms/puzzles.  Some other games might be very decompressed, with rooms purely for scenery that you breeze through in a few seconds when walking from A to B.  Some of the "rooms" in Resonance are title screen, end credits, and various computer interfaces.

[Radiant]

Radiant can I just ask you, with your Locations count, are they all playable locations or might some of those be rooms for cut scenes etc?

Some rooms are only cut scenes, but also some AGS rooms are used for multiple locations. For instance in atotk, all ocean locations are the same room, including those with rocks or islAnd visible, and even the intro shipboard scene.

[MurrayL]

Here are the stats for Astroloco:

Total sprites:      1442
Sprite folders:      166
Total views:      152
Total GUIs:      21
Inventory Items:   20
Characters:      26
Dialog topics:      14
Rooms:         38
Lines of code:      9868
Recorded speech lines:   1813

I'd estimate about 2 - 3 hours of gameplay. Perhaps 4 if you're new to adventure games.

[HandsFree]

Black Sect has 31 rooms, not counting close ups and introduction.
The original must have been 10+ hours as it was very difficult and unforgiving, if you managed to finish it at all.
The remake I did removed (most of?) the frustrating bits and reportedly takes about 3 hours.