Length.

[DanielH]

If I were to make a full (ish) length game, what do you think is the average no. of screens to aim at ?(vague question i know, but I'd like to know)

[Darth Mandarb]

No less than 1, but not more that 345,127.

[DanielH]

Thank you so much Mandarb. Let me re-phrase it: 'How long should a full length adventure game last?'

[skuttleman]

I won't play any adventure game without a minimum of 5 billion rooms.

.. and even that's pushing it.

Seriously, though. I don't think the number of rooms is NEARLY as important as how many things there are to accomplish in each room (and maybe how many times the player has to revisit rooms).

I'd bet if you focussed on characters, story, and puzzles, you could make a full-length game with 25 - 30 backgrounds. Hell, King's Quest I & II only had 30-something rooms, I think.

[Matti]

As it's said in the games-section:

medium lenght game: a couple of hours

full lenght game: "should keep you playing for a while", meaning: more than a couple of hours, so at least a couple of days..

[DanielH]

skuttleman: I agree. ten puzzles in one room equals ten rooms and one puzzle. So rooms aren't important. It's just that i'm finding it hard to get to grips of how much I should actually plan for my game, In case it's ridiculously short/long.

[Radiant]

I'd bet if you focussed on characters, story, and puzzles, you could make a full-length game with 25 - 30 backgrounds. Hell, King's Quest I & II only had 30-something rooms, I think.

Not really. The KQ1 overworld is 48 screens, the KQ2 overworld is 49 screens excluding the ocean. And neither of that is counting all the indoors, underground, and cloudscape scenes. So in terms of Sierra classics, you're looking at 60-90 rooms each. The Quest for Glory games have substantially more than that, but they're cheating a bit by having a lot of rooms be copy/paste jobs of one another.

On the other hand, KQ6 has a lot less rooms, and compensates by having a lot of things happen in each room. It depends on what you want with the game. If you want to give the idea of an expansive countryside, you'll need to put in a lot of rooms for that.

[skuttleman]

Not really. The KQ1 overworld is 48 screens, the KQ2 overworld is 49 screens excluding the ocean. And neither of that is counting all the indoors, underground, and cloudscape scenes. So in terms of Sierra classics, you're looking at 60-90 rooms each.

My bad. But, I still think it could be done in 30 with appropriate planning.

I was, for a short time, planning a full length game. I asked a friend of mine who grew up playing the same games I did, to help me plan the story/puzzles, etc. I eventually got tired of the project because my friend couldn't get over his deep compulsion to pad it with MORE PUZZLES! MORE ROOMS! MORE SEGMENTS! MORE!! MORE!! MORE!! MORE!! I quit because I got tired of explaining to him:

A good game with a strong plot and rising action/climax/resolution arc, story-related puzzles, interesting character development, and fun game play are going to make a game of ANY length fun.

I'm not trying to say you're nof focussed on the important things. All I'm saying, is maybe you shouldn't worry so much about length until the end.

[Babar]

20cm. So: nyaaah!

[jetxl]

My rule of thumb is a game with a total amount of rooms less than 10 is a small length game.
The difference between medium and full is a bit vague, though I'd say that a game with 30 rooms or more is big for an ags game.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Even a game with 50 rooms, if the puzzles are simplistic/awkward or just plain non-existent, will take you very little time to go through.  Although I'm not a massive proponent of puzzle design to extend game length (I prefer more interesting things than slide puzzles to occupy my time) you definitely should work on some kind of mechanic to legitimately extend the play time of your game, whether by making the world large and worth exploring or by repeatedly challenging the player.

[Nostradamus]

You can have a long game with a fairly limited amount of rooms. It's all about what you do with them. You can have lots of generic screens with nothing to do in them like in KQ1 or QFG1 or you can have a game with not many rooms like the Sam & Max Telltale series where you don't have a lot of rooms, but there's A LOT to do in each screen and as the plot progresses you return to the rooms and have new stuff to do.