Frankly, I think jRPGs have gotten too long. I don't have time for 70 hour games personally, and I doubt many people do. Back in the 16bit heydays I think the final fantasy games were around 25-35 hours, and with a good pace.

My point is, don't try to force the length of your story. Tell the story you want to tell, and that will determine how long it is. Shooting for an arbitrary length of time just because it's "typical" will only make your game worse -- unless you're actually able to fill that time with good stuff. I'd much rather play, and even pay for, a 20 hour RPG with an interesting story with good pacing, than to play or pay for a 40 hour game with a lot of dull filler and poor pacing -- even if the 20 hour game was the 40 hour game with all the fluff cut out.

100% agree with the above poster,
JRpg's were my favourite genre in the NES and SNES era but their increasing verboseness and lack of improvement in gameplay has completely driven me away from them.

Quote: Original post by rufii
Thank you all for the input. I'm at 155K words, and I'm only halfway through the story. I'm good I believe for now.

I have only one last question. I've done sections on music, characters, controls, locations, NPC's, an executive overview, combat system, menus, sidequest (as story progresses), experience, camera, and working on story itself. Do I need a detailed explanation of every monster in my game, or just bosses? Or neither? Is it up to me or the game designer? Thank you again.

I would have thought that writing about music, controls, combat system, etc. effectively made you the game designer.

Why constrain yourself to a certain amount of text for your story? You could easily write down a story and go into every detail of every item in the world and reach the same page amount as another story that just touches on the main ideas but presents more. Look at 20 pages of a childrens book and compare it to 20 pages or a novel.

I would compare it to one of my favorite programming quotes (I think by mr. Gates)...

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

Same thing would apply to writing for games.

So you're essentially saying my newb butt is only supposed to write the plot? I am in no way a game designer. Well I feel stupid lol.

That highly depends - are you working with a group of people or are you on your own ?

If you are on your own - then it is up to you. If you are working in a group - ask the game designer what they expect from you.

What would I do - in either case I would do the main story and perhaps some background on various peoples / places to give the world a solid view for any other people that need to have a spring board to work from.

Quote: Original post by rufii
So you're essentially saying my newb butt is only supposed to write the plot? I am in no way a game designer.

Like the previous responder said, but to put it in other words, it depends entirely on your purpose. Why are you writing this exactly? The purpose and intent of a document, and who the intended reader is, are the crucial factors in determining what you write, its length, its tone... everything!

You should also compare to Manga and Anime. On average, a manga chapter has 1000 words, and on average, an Anime epsiode has 3 chapters, or you can convert 1000 words into 10 minutes of dialogue. From there, you will see that 80k of some of those games means about 80 minutes of reading, and that will last about 10 hours of gameplay for speed runs. There is thus a ratio of 6.5:1.0 playing time to reading text ratio, and your game should last about 7.5 times as much time as it takes to read the story of the game. The players who try to master everything in the game should take about 4 times longer than the speed run players, so they should spend their total time about 30 times as much as only reading the storying of the game. Remember this 30:1 ratio and you will know how long your story is in comparision to the game length. The average reader reads 200 to 350 words per minute, but to ensure that they can absorb the information, they will take about twice as long. The average rate would be 100 words per minute, equalizing to manga anime conversion rate.

Summary:
100 words per minute reading rate
30:1 total gameplay to dialogue ratio for total completion
7.5:1 total gameplay to dialogue ratio for speed game
6.5:1 gameplay to dialogue ratio for speed game
You want the game to have a certain hour limit, so use this as a guide.

I believe an average time for Final Fantasy IV(US 2) was about sixty hours.

Quote: Original post by rufii
I have only one last question. I've done sections on music, characters, controls, locations, NPC's, an executive overview, combat system, menus, sidequest (as story progresses), experience, camera, and working on story itself. Do I need a detailed explanation of every monster in my game, or just bosses? Or neither? Is it up to me or the game designer? Thank you again.

I think this article is worth reading, though it's not exactly about what you shoud do as the writer/scriptor, but it tells you what is up to the designer and so not up to you :D

p.s. you may find more faqs at Mr. Sloper's page, though this is the best I came around, IMAO (he has honored this page a few comments above :D)