Well, I don’t know if production budgets for videogames work in the same way that they do movies but with movies, you have your production budget (i.e. the cost it takes to make the actual movie) and then on top of that, you have marketing and distribution costs, which are typically the same amount as the production budget (so a movie with a production budget of $100 million, will actually cost $200 million to bring to market). If videogames are similarly structured, then you could double the projected production budget.
Like I say though, I’m really not well versed in the market place realities of videogames, so I don’t know if that same logic applies.
I think that $600,000 - $1.5 million is a very low ballpark figure for this game but ultimately, who knows (other than Ron and co, I mean)? I will say that considering the involvement of Disney, I would imagine that the game has had a substantially larger figure than that pumped into it.
It’s important to remember that even $5 million projects are considered to be relatively low budget within the realm of videogame productions (the Kickstarter for the Shenmue III project had a budget of around $20 million, for example - albeit that was a 3D game, so obviously the production costs would be higher). Perhaps more accurately we can look towards Double Fine’s Broken Age, which had a budget of over $4 million. I think that Return to Monkey Island will, at the very least, match that cost.
Having said that, money management goes a long way and by all accounts, Terrible Toybox are highly adapt at appropriating funds efficiently. After all, look at the Kickstarted Space Venture/Ace Hardway game; it was funded a decade ago and has still yet to release, whereas, Ron and co were able to release Thimbleweed Park within a couple of years of being funded. They seem to be very efficient when it comes to matters of management and project planning.
Yes I think Ron (and/or whoever helps him to make the budget) used the money very efficiently to contract correct people but money was not a big issue due to Disney/LucasFilm approval. They were able to hire people to do storyboards etc. showcases that.
That’s the reply that I wanted to give, but I changed my mind because it inevitably leads to the notorious black-hole topic “What’s the definition of adventure game”.
It started with a cartoon cutscene in the style of CMI, with Guybrush and LeChuck arguing, but I couldn’t understand a word because my daughter was speaking aloud the whole time.
Then some voodoo happens, and… it’s now a 3D first person game. You’re a 6yo girl with a balloon who needs to board a train but you don’t have a ticket. The train station had a restaurant where I was able to untie some ropes making the whole floor go lower a couple of feet revealing another door but I had no idea why I did that. But I then could enter a grocery store to buy baby carrots.
I remember there were digital clocks in a post office spelling the words OHIO and IDAHO and it was clear it was part of a puzzle but I couldn’t speak with the clerks yet.
by the usual definition. But an adventure game without text it’s too different a product. It’s plausible that a lot of people like solving puzzles but hate reading (or listening to a lot of dialogue). And that, together with the innovation, could explain the success of Machinarium.
(it’s not really innovative: Gobliins 2 was arguably the same thing, and much better, but it had been forgotten by then)
To speak to the clerks you have to give the balloon to them, they will tell you that they like baby carrots. Go to the grocery and buy the carrots, when you go back to the post office, it will now be closed for lunch.
To get into it and give the clerks the carrots you will need to solve the digital clock puzzle - each letter represents a different number/time on the clocks. Once you have lined them up, the door will open - give the carrots to the clerks in exchange for the train ticket.
Just a random thought prompted by the presence of Murray in Return to Monkey Island: I really hope I will not need to refresh my memory about the post-MI2 games to get all the jokes and references in RtMI.
I have played them all, but I didn’t care much about them and I forgot everything.
Budget depends on deals and contracts, also how much team members require for their job.
You can get less salary if you have more shares. US is very expensive doesnt matter what you are building here.
You are spending 6mil$ for your team, but there are people who would do it for less and bring up better results…its just about who is the lead on this project and his decisions. There is always some waste of money and lead is hoping to get what he paid for.
Budget depends on many factors + marketing. Also delays, issues, fixes, releases, platforms etc.
I’ve seen speculation online where people think this will slot in between Monkey Island 2 and Monkey Island 3 , but then Murray, a character from the third game, is in the teaser. So how does the chronology work? When is it set?
Ron: How would you describe it, Dave? It’s kind of amorphous. It’s undefinable in a lot of ways.
Dave: And possibly not important, ultimately. Trying to assign specific numbers to the stories will become hard at some point.
Like Murray, can we expect to see nods to Escape from Monkey Island and Tales of Monkey Island in this game?
Ron: We very purposefully don’t do anything to invalidate any of the canon that’s happened in those games. We’re not saying any of those things didn’t happen, we don’t talk down to them at all. We embrace a lot of the things we liked in those games. So we were very, very careful about that. I remember some of those conversations Dave and I had, there was this kind of tendency to just throw everything out, let’s just start over. But the thing we finally came around to is, these are very beloved games. We didn’t make them, but there are still a lot of good things in those games, and we wanted to embrace those, not whisk them away.
“Amorphous” timeline/chronology? I don’t know what it means, but it’s clear to me that the position in time of this game does not belong to a perfectly linear timeline.
I was afraid of the nonlinear timeline possibility, but I dared not mention it.
Could it be that you start in the amusement park, and when you get back you can choose the year? you can get back to different times, and your actions in the past change the future…
That wouldn’t be so bad actually. But DOTT already did that.
Ron started designing a time travel game called Time Fly when he was at Lucasfilm, at some point after Maniac Mansion “but probably before Monkey Island” -
And he had the design docs for that game or something similar with time travel -
So maybe RtMI has some time travel in it, kind of like Space Quest 4 where they visit the other games.
The simpler explanation IMHO is: they are reusing some characters from Curse and MI4, but reintroducing them from scratch, as if they never met before. As a result, RTMI is perfectly coherent with MI and MI2, but it makes Curse incoherent with MI-MI2-RTMI.
For example, in the beginning of CMI Guybrush doesn’t seem to know who Murray is, which is impossible because they already met in RTMI.
This would mean everyone is reintroduced and you won’t need to remember anything that happened in CMI.
Then again, I’m not sure what I said is compatible with this:
“We very purposefully don’t do anything to invalidate any of the canon that’s happened in those games.”
But maybe it’s compatible. They don’t invalidate the important events happened in those games (like who married whom). They invalidate minor parts, like when characters first met.
