> What do you feel are reasonable limits to the amount of text that should appear on any given screen, to avoid forcing the player into excessive page-scrolling and so forth?

My attitude is that if your screen is set to the 640x480 resolution, too bad if you have to scroll. It's too much of a pain to deal with screens with so little real estate. Several of the games on "Classic Games" require you to scroll between every move if you play with a screen size of anything less than 800x600. I have mine set to 1024x768, and that's the set up I have when I design all the pages on RinkWorks.

It is good, however, to keep things short strictly from a gameplay perspective. After you've been to a spot twenty times, you really don't need to see the same 15 lines of description text, which by that point is more in the way than helpful or colorful. Long strings for the action (pink box) text, however, is more acceptable, since that only shows up at precisely the moment the reader *needs* the text. I don't know if you've noticed how you play, but in all likelihood, when you played Fantasy Quest, you spent a lot more time reading the text in the pink boxes than the text in the green boxes, even if your playing style is slow and methodical.

Keep those thoughts in mind, but I really don't want to give you a hard fast rule to go by. It's pretty much up to you. You have to figure out how to strike the balance between informative and information overload -- the happy medium may vary depending on the style and mood of the game you wish you create.

But as far as scrolling is concerned, it'd be nice if users with 1024x768 screens and probably 800x600 screens didn't have to scroll very much. You can poke around in Fantasy Quest and copy and paste the text there into whatever you're editing with -- then you'd get an idea of how long your text will appear in the game.