I try to make my stories an average length, and when I ask what the average length is people usually say 1000 to 1500 lines, so I tried to make every episode reach 1000 lines but it ends up not being enough, why? Because about 200 of these lines are directing, overlays placement, background characters placement and animations, etc… So not a lot of it is actual dialogue and things happening in the story, to reach the 1000 lines length average which is a 10min average, I would have to count the lines minus the directing etc…
So I would suggest having an estimation of how long the episode is going to be, that algorithm could consits of the average time to read one line of dialogue, and wouldn’t count the extra directing and overlays line that don’t add any time to the story.
What do you think?
I totally support this idea, just a thought that maybe the community could use in the mean time: What if we normalized authors playing through a chapter, timing it, and then putting the approximate time of each chapter in the Chapter Teaser? It wouldn’t help with the first chapter, but it’d be something
That would be so helpful! I sometimes worry my episodes are too short depending on choices (which is another thing Episode should have in mind when making this feature.
I usually just time my episodes while I play, and I notice that around 2000 lines is the right length for me, although it caps out at about 15 minutes. I use a lot of overlays and spot directing so probably 500 - 600 lines is just that. I’ve noticed some authors putting the estimated read time in the teaser of the episode, which I might start doing.
Support! I usually try to aim for around ten minutes every episode so I end up having to use a timer on my phone while playing the episode or vice versa.