Word count in branchy Ink stories

Just wondering if anyone had a favourite technique for finding the word count of ink stories? Google has not been the most helpful as “ink” is a pretty… generic name… Thinking of submitting something for Sub-Q, which has quite a strict word count. One of the problems I foresee with getting the word count from a transcript is that there’s quite a bit of branching.

I suppose you could chunk the transcript into its constituent storylet (or whatever Inkle calls it), then emplace each storylet into a map structure (i.e. something that doesn’t allow repetitions). That would make removing repeated entries a trivial affair.

Right now, we just use a normal word-counter and put up with the logic being included… one feature we’d like to add to inky is a padbasher (which buzzes through the story looking for errors) - that could conceivably generate min/max/average word counts for playthroughs as well, which we hadn’t considered, but would be cool.

It’s not too hard to write a padbasher if you export a web-version of your game and hack into the javascript (* and know some javascript).

cheers!
jon

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