How many lines of non overlay or placing is good for a story?

I don’t want to fill my story with pointless drama but I also don’t want to make it too short.
I obviously have to time it but how many lines do you think will make a decent length of a chapter in minutes minus spoting?

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Heyy! Your story should be at least 20 to 25 minutes (in my opinion). Guess that would make a perfect length of a chapter! And also it should be upto you, like you should plan to stop the chapter at some suspicious point, leaving the readers at suspense. That would be actually great! Hope this helps you. If you have anything else, don’t hesitate to ask me!:blush:

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I typically make chapters between 15 and 20 minutes and I’ve on occasion had complaints that they’re too long even then. (Not that I care, that’s what I continue to aim for, even still, because that’s how long I like my episodes to be.)

In terms of number of lines, that depends on how you code. Some people put spaces between lines (joseph evans style), some people stick a whole bunch of lines together into one line (AND and THEN overload people). There are also a lot of other ways, but the point remains that lines of code doesn’t necessarily correlate with chapter length. Furthermore, your chapters will be longer if you include more dialogue and shorter if most of your lines are overlay animations. I use quite literally sometimes hundreds of overlays in each of my episodes, so my chapters range from around 3000 lines to 5000 lines or more for about 15 minutes. With that said, for the same length of time, a lot of people I know try to reach a target amount of 1000-1500. If your story only has like 400 lines, I can almost guarantee it’s not enough.

What I would recommend doing is reading a couple of your favorite stories–stories with chapters whose length is, in your opinion, perfect. (If you know for a fact a story has an insanely good plot but super long/short chapters, that wouldn’t be a good one to choose since it’s not a good chapter length.) Write as if you were writing for a reader like yourself. Time how long it takes you to read those chapters. Maybe read a couple. From there, you could average them out and determine what a good target time would be.

When I do the final edits on my episode, and as well as a couple times throughout the coding process, I try to time my episodes. At the end, I try to read through it three times then average the times out so I can get an approximate run time for that episode. Do not forget to keep in mind that some people read faster than others, too, so it may also be helpful to have your friends read through your chapters and have them time it as well as critique the length.

Best of luck with your story!

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I use a lot of action/overlay sequences in my story, and I would say that without branching, I generally aim for about 1500 lines per episode (depends on how much action, though, since I sometimes get told that my episodes are long).

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