@> Meteor Blaster DX sounds very cool. Now, I just wish that someone would
@> try and do a new role playing game for the Turbo...or would that just take
@> an unrealistic amount of work? I would definetely want to be involved in
@> the creation of the storyline on a project like that...
thanks -- I think I speak for everyone who worked on MB that
we are all quite pleased wiuth the results. It is unfortunate
that so few will actually get to see and play MB (sales have been
pretty low at this point, about 25% of what Implode was). Which
is probably why a real 30-40 hour RPG won't happen. The amount of
effort would take years (including having a dedicated team of more
than 1 coder and 1 graphics person). I do not have a good guess,
but I would estimate that the amount of work (man hours) that went into
just the coding of MB well exceeds 750 hours (for those of you who are
too "PC" for your own good and offended tha I used "man hours" rather
that "person hours" this is the same as "over 5250 dog hours").
The amount of code needed for an RPG would easily double that. The amount
of Graphics work would also easily double, or even triple the effort
of MB, and then there is also an additional factor of "tile mapping"
to create the worlds -- only 1% of MB needed this (for all the scrolling
cinemas). In an RPG this is a major factor in the world maps, the
cities and the dungeons.
Bottom line, is that the amount of effort would probably take 3+ years
to produce (the time line from start to finish on MB was 10 months,
including 3 waiting for the bloody CDs). And if you look at the
decline of interest for Duo titles, maybe 100 persons would ultimately
get to enjoy it.
I must stress again, that MB was not created for MindRec to "make it
big" -- I have no dillusions about that, but the cost of making the
CDs is high (and got higher this time due to the method used), and
at this point I have not yet broken even. Hopefully that will
change in the next few weeks. But it does not look good (at this
point) for future "grand scale" commercial releases. I am not
predicting the end of PCE development, but chances are, unless things
change, that all future releases will be via a downloadable ROM or ISO,
and not a professional looking package.
-bt