How long should a Full Length game be?

[MRollins]

How long would a game need to be for you to consider a game full length? I'm designing my first game but I find that it's tough to judge how long some puzzles will take to figure out. How do you determine when the game is liong enough during the design phase?

[Ghost]

That's pretty hard to judge by yourself, mostly because you know what to do and how to play a "perfect game". I'd say you take your game to at least two beta testers, and let them test it, and ask them for their average time spent on the game. That is a rough base. When your game's pretty much in the final stages, give it to a new tester and take his time also. Then, with some rule-by-thumb guessing, you should decide between short, medium and long.
Now, short is simple- hardly puzzles, maybe ten minutes to the quarter of an hour, that would be a short game.
The line between medium and full length, however, is a bit harder to draw, but I'd say everything you can solve in about an hour is still medium length. Above that, you may want to take into account how much gameplay there is.

Funny enough, if you know your way around a game and skip all cutscenes, you can beat DOTT, Full Throttle and Maniac Mansion in less than an hour. Makes you think, doesn't it 

[Andail]

When it comes to the full length category, quality plays a big part as well.

The time length can best be measured by playing the game in normal pace (without clicking away dialogue or skipping scenes) with a walkthrough. That is, no short cuts but no getting stuck either.
As Ghost said, one hour is a reasonable minimum time for a full length game.

Many games, even professional (read Sierra) tend to increase the playing time by introducing walking deads, and also by letting the character travel back and forth repetiously to perform mundane tasks. Especially if you can't "teleport" or fast-change screens, such methods are very time consuming and also very annoying.

[Ionias]

I set the goal for myself when I was creating Fatman that it should be at least an hour long. Even at that some reviewers still said it was on the short side of things. Generally though, I would imagine that to be a good judge of your game's length, it should take you about an hour as the game's creator to complete it.

[Snarky]

Since you're making your first game, don't aim to create a very long one. If the idea, story and puzzles you have in mind just add up to a short, ten-minute quest, that's fine. It won't make people any less keen to play your game. (In fact, I'm often grateful to games that don't require many hours of commitment.) And if you keep it short and sweet you'll be able to focus more attention on each detail, so the quality will be higher.

In fact, unless you're making a commercial game, I see no reason to ever aim for any particular length. Let the game be as long as it needs to be, and no longer.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Someone mentioned that when you have played through classics like DoTT or Monkey Island you can breeze through them in an hour or less, and that's very true.  The quality of the challenges you place before the player will directly influence how long it takes for them to complete a game (or whether they complete it at all).  If you present puzzles that seem designed without any kind of logic, the player will either stop playing the game or start resorting to a walkthrough, neither of which are outcomes you want.

Some problems facing modern game designers are the abundance of walkthroughs and hint sites available, which drastically diminishes the play length of an adventure game specifically because they are typically light- or no-action affairs, instead relying on the player to puzzle through events.  This is one reason why I hate walkthroughs generally, though there are other reasons.  I'm not against people using them if they are truly stuck on something for an hour, it's just those people who will pick one up and go through the whole game using them that defeats any purpose the game had:  to challenge them.

Afterall, a game is a challenge; a challenge directly to the player to make their way over platforms or through enemies or puzzles to the end and be rewarded for it.

I don't think there's any real measurement for what a full game is aside from an individual's sense that the game has fulfilled their needs for a game.  Some games are very short on depth and pose a specific challenge, like Break-Out, and yet that is considered a full length game.

So what classifies a game as a full length game?  Probably something like:

1.  Was the player satisfied by the play experience?

2.  Does the game show clear effort on the part of the designer?


I'm sure you could add more points, but I think these are probably the two main things a player considers after playing a game.  If the game was over quickly, it doesn't necessarily mean it was short.  The puzzles could have been very logical, for instance, so the player will then decide whether they were satisfied by the play experience and whether clear effort was made by the designer to make the game.

[Smumm]

Either I'm a really slow player or most authors do not follow anything like the one hour rule. :o To say a few Infinity String and 5 days a stranger took me a lot longer then one hour, probably four five and those are rated as medium length games. If you ask me, I would say less then half an hour is a short game, more then 4 hours is full length (first time played.)

If the idea, story and puzzles you have in mind just add up to a short, ten-minute quest, that's fine. It won't make people any less keen to play your game. (In fact, I'm often grateful to games that don't require many hours of commitment.) And if you keep it short and sweet you'll be able to focus more attention on each detail, so the quality will be higher.

Agreed very much, at least I value my time and if the game can make use of every second I put in to playing it, the value of the game increases greatly. It's probably one of the key factors to make a superior game. Some games really waste the player's time and even worst if it has been intentionally programmed to make the game longer.

[DanielH]

Either I'm a really slow player or most authors do not follow anything like the one hour rule. :o To say a few Infinity String and 5 days a stranger took me a lot longer then one hour, probably four five

I think they mean an hour for the game's creator to complete. Which would obviously be considerably shorter because the have created the game and know the ins and outs, because of the work they have done in the past X months.