02.24.08
Bragging Rights
So… simply for the hell of it, I just exported all of our conversation files from TNM, used Word’s excellent search and replace to clean out all the comments and name tags and seperators so only the actual lines remained, and then checked the count. I think the result entitles me to show off a little.
The Nameless Mod has:
13,224 lines
194,846 words
1,050,568 characters (with spaces)
868,897 characters (without spaces)
So over the course of 6 years, we’ve apparently produced 194,846 words of dialogue, monologue, infolink messages, and barks. 18,680 words are infolink messages, 20,890 words are AI barks (”ow ow, you set me on fire, curse your eyes” for example) and the rest is dialogue and one-liners from throughout the game and the cutscenes.
This is pretty far from Torment’s 1.2+ million word script, of course, but then we didn’t get paid to write all this. Having written something like 75-80% of it myself is unfortunately not an excuse, since Chris Avellone alledgedly wrote half the script for Torment by himself, but I’m happy to admit Avellone is better than I am. In my defense, I also spent a considerable amount of time working on maps, skins, textures, and a little gameplay code.
I wish there were an easy way to figure out how much of that I actually wrote myself, because my ego is always on the prowl for an easy boost, but I’m all too happy to give Alek, Andrew, Gelo, Larry, Nick, and Zaid the credit they’re due for helping out. Especially Andy and Zaid have made significant contributions with Andy doing some great work setting up some of the early dialogue (and a whole subplot involving his own character) and Zaid writing the last AI barks when I thought I would lose my mind before I’d finished.
Still though… 13,224 lines, eh? I guess we have our work cut out for us with voice acting that whole thing (and worse yet - because that work rests on far fewer shoulders - processing all the audio).
As an amusing anecdote, it would appear we have about as many lines as the eminently excellent Burden of 80 Proof mod has words.
Morten S. Clausen said,
February 24, 2008 at 14:02
And here’s another fun fact:
Not only did you write a novel longer than War and Peace for this game, which is impressive in itself, you also spent 366 words or 2035 characters (with spaces) telling the world! The amount of work put into this project is staggering and frightening. It itches my lazy bones. You, sir, just made a list somewhere…
Jonas said,
February 24, 2008 at 14:23
I know I’m quite the wordy bastard.
Of course the necessary disclaimer here is that quality isn’t measured in numbers. Sure, we have 437 pages of conversations in TNM, but it may all be crap! If nothing else I guarantee you that Torment’s
1,21.2 million (edit: Damn you, decimals!) words are all better than our 200kEER said,
February 24, 2008 at 19:10
I hear Duke Nukem Forever has 194,847 words, and will release this year.
Jonas said,
February 24, 2008 at 21:59
Oh jog on, EER!
Shacker said,
February 25, 2008 at 12:03
You Europeans and your comma decimals, always confusing me.
More seriously, having seen a good chunk of TNM’s writing I think I can say a few things about it. Its quality is understandably inconsistent, but generally pretty decent throughout. If you see any real gems when you play it when it comes out it’ll probably be the more recent stuff as Jonas is still maturing as a writer for some reason (it’s almost as if he’s LEARNING as he’s working on the mod). The voice acting probably hurt us in the writing department a little bit as we have had to make concessions to make sure all of our characters get voiced though most of the time it’s not a huge issue and we’ve often found creative ways to work around gaps. Overall I think you’ll find Jonas has done some very good work given that he was working with vague characterizations of people’s forum personalities and that especially by mod standards it’ll be surprisingly good.
On a personal note I’m pretty happy with my contributions to TNM’s dialogue on a quality level, though they’re not exactly numerous. There’s definitely a reason I joined the mod as a coder and not a writer…
Jonas said,
February 25, 2008 at 14:27
Damnit, I tried so hard to get those decimals right, only to slip up on Torment’s word count! Frick!
But aww, thanks Nick!
Your work is very good, and the fact that you do so little writing on the mod could actually be an advantage to you because it affords you more time to make your writing really good, don’t you think?
That’s another reason my latest work is significantly better than my first contributions: I originally churned out almost 80k words in the first two years, and that was all I did on TNM. When you’ve written AI barks for 50 characters, your inspiration is running on empty. Now that I do all sorts of other things, my creative juices are depleted much slower.
Plus, there’s a hell of a difference between writing to meet some arbitrary ambitious goal of “enough text” and writing because you got an idea that you want to see implemented or because you’ve found a hole in the game logic that needs solving. Happily I’ve had ample time to tweak the crap out of the really old stuff we wrote
Smike said,
September 20, 2008 at 18:10
200k?!
NICE!
Well done Jonas. Awesome and highly impressive. I’ve certainly never written that much on a single project!
Jonas said,
September 20, 2008 at 18:16
Question is: Are they 200,000 good words, or is it all crap?
Fortunately, time will tell.