Just wondering, how long are the longest AGS-made games? I know its kind of relative to game play styles and how clever you are when it comes to the particular puzzle solving of any game. But generally speaking.
Also what kind of file sizes are people seeing for completed full-legnth games?
And how many 'full-legnth' games are actually out there?
I'm not entirely sure, but when it comes to file size, you have to consider if there's music in the game, and is it midi or real music; and did they use ogg files for best compression or mp3s? And is there speech?
There are so many factors to consider when it comes to the size of a game. In terms of "physical" size as in amount of locations, then you have Other Worlds by Alkis, and Pleurghburg by Chrille, which both have well over 100 locations.
A game can also be big in terms of interactions, dialogues; basically things to do and see. Resonance by Vince isn't very big in terms of game universe, but has lots of stuff going on, various computer interfaces and technical features along with a gameplay that's divided between several characters, and that makes the game meatier.
I haven't played Heroine's Quest, but something tells me there's a ton of stuff to do in there.
Then of course a game can take long time to finish because it has many and complicated puzzles - most people finish my game, TSP, in between 5 and 10 hours, which I think is in the top percentile of playing time amongst AGS games.
Longest AGS-made game is...
Are we there yet? (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/763/) by Obi-Leo
This game's length is...
INFINITE!
Cheers dudes. Any more thoughts from anyone else? or from you 3 on other games?
I suppose we can factor in the originals too, lucas arts etc. Can anyone remember how long games like Monkey Island or Zak McKraken took? (minus floppy disc swapping and load time (laugh)
Just trying to gauge how long Body Pharm should be when it comes to the full version. Demo will be 10-30 mins depending on your experience and logic skills. Was thinking 2-5 hrs for full version. But we shall see.
I think that size in megabytes is pretty meaningless, because this can easily be increased by cranking up the resolution and color depth or by including lots of movie scenes. Likewise, I think that size in AGS rooms is pretty meaningless because it's pretty easy to add a bunch of filler rooms in which nothing actually happens. For example, compare Sierra's King's Quest III (which has a 20-room countryside but most rooms don't contain anything useful, and an infinite procedurally-generated desert to the west) to King's Quest VI (which has islands consisting just of three to five rooms each, but each room has at least one major event and sometimes more).
The best measure of game length is possibly the size of its translation text file (not the game script, but the actual in-game text). This gives an idea of how much there is to do within the game.
Machinarium and Dropsy would be non-existant using that method. I might be splitting hairs here, just saying that no one method is very foolproof, and especially counting just dialogue line seems slightly off target considering we're dealing with games here and not books...
Game length = (number of puzzles * average puzzle difficulty) + time wasted on walking through 10+ rooms while cursing developer, who did not made a quick-travel in this game + time wasted on reading boring dialogs + time spent admiring wondrous backgrounds.
Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Thu 16/04/2015 00:01:49
Game length = (number of puzzles * average puzzle difficulty) + time wasted on walking through 10+ rooms while cursing developer, who did not made a quick-travel in this game + time wasted on reading boring dialogs + time spent admiring wondrous backgrounds.
÷ number of times you call the Lacasarts helpline.
My game, Adventure Island, is definitely a full length game. It uses over 200 rooms, though a lot of those are for the two short first person sections (first person view eats rooms!). There are also close-ups and titles, etc, which use up rooms. The game contains 50 plus puzzles of various sorts, and has nine different true characters and a number who were really talking objects. There are ten completely separate locations, each using a number of rooms. The file size is a little over 300MB. One of the people who played my game and commented upon it estimated it at between 24 and 72 hours of gameplay.
Quote from: elentgirl on Thu 16/04/2015 15:33:40
One of the people who played my game and commented upon it estimated it at between 24 and 72 hours of gameplay.
I believe that was me...And yup, I will testify that Adventure Island is one of the longest and most satisfying games I have ever played (notice that I didn't even say "AGS" or "adventure" games)...I literally LIVED this game for about 2-3 weeks and played it whenever I had any spare time whatsoever...
I can't believe that this game is not more well-known...It is one of the true classics!!!
Im the type of person that if I am enjoying a game i explore every inch of every room. Try and open every drawer, look at every detail. Ill milk a game for everything its worth. So Adventure Island would simply take too much of my time hahahaha. Obviously need to play that and many others some day though.
MB-wise, I was still curious, as the Demo alone for BodyPharm is 260MB zipped, and 685Mb unzipped (compiled folder). Im wanting the full size game at least 10 times longer in terms of content and gameplay, so Im a bit worried this will turn into a 4-5GB monster hahahaha. Wondered if im overstretching AGS? (a question I will save for the tech forums) Was kinda hoping people would say their games were a few gig lol (roll)
I'm in the same boat as you. My compiled folder is currently about 1GB and I've only just started importing my assets. I don't think I've been very smart about sprite sizes and alpha channels so there is room for optimization. But even optimized I'm sure it'll end up being a heavy game(and not an especially long one.) I'm glad to hear that your compiled folder was reduced by so much when zipping. Hopefully people won't be discouraged from downloading.
I thought that game length was measured by how long it takes to play from start to finish when you know exactly what you need to do to finish it. Because not all players play the game the same way or take the same amount of time solving the puzzles.
So for me, it the number of rooms, puzzles, dialogues, etc. don't matter that much. If you had a walk-through (and every one who made a game has it in his head), how long would it take to complete the game?
For instance, mine took me +/- 20 minutes to complete... and I didn't bother reading the dialogues with depth... so am counting my game as a 30 minutes length game.
Just a reminder to those here who have mentioned huge game files:
Have you remembered to check "compress sprite file" in the general options before you compile? If not, give it a try. It could save you hundreds of MBs...
(It says "loss of performance" or something scary like that in the option description, but I've never noticed a drop in performance so maybe this is an AGS leftover from back in 2001 or something?)
On that note, if you seem to get "loss of performance", then run Winsetup, go to advance options and increase the buffer size. (nod) Wonder why it's still set at a default of 20Mb... if you don't have 100MB free to buffer, then go get a new HD or do some "house cleaning". :P
The only things I've seen cause loss of performance within AGS are large multi-layer transparency effects and overcomplicated scripting.
Quote from: Mandle on Thu 16/04/2015 23:31:39
Just a reminder to those here who have mentioned huge game files:
Have you remembered to check "compress sprite file" in the general options before you compile? If not, give it a try. It could save you hundreds of MBs...
(It says "loss of performance" or something scary like that in the option description, but I've never noticed a drop in performance so maybe this is an AGS leftover from back in 2001 or something?)
Cheers! Never noticed that hahahaa
Quote from: Andail on Wed 15/04/2015 23:22:20
Machinarium and Dropsy would be non-existant using that method. I might be splitting hairs here, just saying that no one method is very foolproof, and especially counting just dialogue line seems slightly off target considering we're dealing with games here and not books...
Correct; this is just the best I could find for
story-based games. Clearly it doesn't apply to everything, but it's a better measure than "megabytes of disk space". Ideally you want to measure average playtime to complete the game, but that depends a lot on the player.
...and of course, turns out there's a website tracking all that. http://howlongtobeat.com/
According to this site, several classic Sierra games clock in at about three hours (KQ1,KQ2,SQ1-3) to 5-6 hours (KQ5-6,SQ4-5,QFG1-2). Indiana Jones and MI1-2 are listed at about 6-7 hours, Tales Of at about 2 each.
These clearly aren't using walkthroughs; you can do KQ1 in about ten minutes, KQ5 in about an hour if you know what you're doing.
RPGs tend to be much longer, such as 30 hours for Ultima 4, 70 hours for Ultima 7, and 35-50 for Planescape Torment.
Quote from: Cassiebsg on Thu 16/04/2015 20:09:41
I thought that game length was measured by how long it takes to play from start to finish when you know exactly what you need to do to finish it.
That's called speedrunning (http://tasvideos.org/) :grin:
My theory is that you should look at most relevant things and talk to all the characters and give time read or listen to the response, execute the puzzle solving as if you got it on your first guess (walk through) and don't skip the cutscenes. I feel that "length of game" will give you a pretty honest idea of the amount of content in the game.
Quote from: Cassiebsg on Thu 16/04/2015 20:09:41
I thought that game length was measured by how long it takes to play from start to finish when you know exactly what you need to do to finish it. Because not all players play the game the same way or take the same amount of time solving the puzzles.
I think this is the "official" way we measure game length in the database, and probably the best. I should add that you're not supposed to click away all dialogue and cut-scenes, but play the game the way it's meant to be played, only never get stuck on puzzles.
Of course, it's still not perfectly fair, because some games rely heavily on puzzle complexity, and they may appear very short when stripped of all puzzle-solving time.
PS:
I thought it might be nice to show you guys this chart I made, showing all visitable locations in TSP:
(https://faravidinteractive.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/mergedcollage.png)
@Andail Nice chart! I even remember all the locations :)
Quote from: Andail on Sat 18/04/2015 12:49:16
Of course, it's still not perfectly fair, because some games rely heavily on puzzle complexity, and they may appear very short when stripped of all puzzle-solving time.
That's why I think the game lenght should be the average time it takes a player to play a game for the first time from start to finish. This information is most helpful from a player's point of view (i.e. how long should I expect this game to take me) and also from a developer's (i.e. how complex is it, how easily people dash through it,...). That's why I always ask testers for the time it took to finish the game.
Quote from: cat on Sun 19/04/2015 07:11:08
That's why I think the game lenght should be the average time it takes a player to play a game for the first time from start to finish.
And what if a player just can't solve one puzzle, is stuck and quits for like 2 days. Then finally when taking a shower or walking the dog he solves the puzzle while not even playing and can then complete the game. Should it be 2 days+ playtime?
Maybe just use the time for a quickrun of the game + 2-5 minutes for every puzzle that is a bit more complex than the obvious
use key with door interaction. But this is highly individual again...
That's why you need the average playtime (or a decent approximation thereof), not the playtime of one random individual that got stuck.
If the average player does get stuck, well, perhaps you should have done more beta testing ;)
Average playtime tests how difficult the game is, not necessarily how "big" it is in terms of content and material. You can make a puzzle or two that are super hard, and that might increase the playtime by hours.
It depends on what we mean with size, of course.
Quest for Infamy has about 250+ rooms - and according to "How Long to Beat" says about 18.5 hours - but with further exploration and discovery, it can take you between 30-50 hours. It's about 1.6 GB, but much of that is the music and full audio.
Bt