Comments on: There will not be a ‘Ben There, Dan That!’ sequel

By: dan

dan — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:43:23 +0000

That’s already in the sequel, Unless. I don’t remember coding it, so it must be a whizzy new AGS feature…!

By: unless

unless — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:20:27 +0000

There is something that we all have now that we did not all have back when the old P&C games were originally around, and that thing is mousewheels. Scrolling through actions would be a lot quicker (and feel more natural) than clicking through.

By: Erlend M

Erlend M — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:35:47 +0000

Fair enough.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:09:54 +0000

Ok, so let’s say you compress five minutes of .ogg to shit and they take 3mb each, and I somehow convince someone to make, what 20 tracks? That’s 100 minutes, and about 60Mb of pure music and a dev time of probably 6-7 months (assuming I’m blagging a friend to do it in his spare time). Also, you’re looking at a download of 80meg+ being downloaded 6000 times a month, which would rape my bandwidth something rotten ten times over.

BTDT was built on zero budget, yes. If you count my time, it cost thousands. Even if I spent all the money I’ve earned through donations on a professional musician to do music for me, it’d cover about five minutes worth of music, at mates’ rates.

Unfortunately, it’s just not feasible, I’m afraid.

By: Erlend M

Erlend M — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:47:59 +0000

Dan sez music files are:

- Massive
Ah, what’s a little disk space in this day and age? If you’re really worried about it you can crunch down mp3 files to a pretty small size with only noticable (but not horrible) degradation.

- Costly to produce
Don’t you have a musical pal who you can volunteer to produce music for your game for fun, fame and free? If not, you can try finding one on the Internets.

- Irritating if short and repetitive
True.

Oh, and zero budget? Didn’t you get, ooh, at least several POUNDS in donations?

By: dan

dan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:50:40 +0000

Yeah, unfortunately music files are massive, costly to produce and irritating if short and repetitive. I’m looking into more music for the sequel, but there’s no way it’ll be a continual loop. We’ll see what happens.

I did my best to put sound effects in throughout to fill the silence, but unfortunately on a budget of ZERO, music’s the first thing to suffer.