To the developers

**Doffy90** · 04-06-2007, 06:19 PM

I have never heard of Frictional Games before so my question is this...

Penumbra Overture is that a low budget game? Cause I never got any info about it until it was released. If it is a low budget game then kudos, its amazing and if its not well its still amazing.

Now for another question.

As I imagine I hope you have the story-line all written so that you just dont write along and maybe ruin the game like some movies have been ruined by sequels. Anyways if the 2 sequels are the same length as Ep1, do you honestly think the whole plot can be revealed in 2 Eps (we didnt get very much information in Ep1)

**rhye** · 04-06-2007, 06:47 PM

Congratulations:
I ahve played the demo and i can see your job is awesome.
The physics engine have nthing to envy Havok engine of Half Life 2. And you can grow up in tour developement...
The greatness of this group constitutes the effort of each one of you.

**Doffy90** · 04-06-2007, 09:50 PM

Agreed but still this was a thread with question to the developers.....

**Thomas** · 04-06-2007, 11:21 PM

Yeah, the game is made on a very low budget, we have recived now publisher funding or anything like that.

Actually there is a lot of hints on what is going on in Ep1 and you can find out alot if you puzzle together all info correctly Wink

. And yeah we have a pretty clear idea where the story is going, but it is still open enough so we can take user feedback into account.

**Jetsetlemming** · 04-07-2007, 02:42 AM

I've got a real clear idea of what the game is about and what threat to the world Philip's talking about in the loading screen messages. Tongue

The book on grey worms near the end has a big bit of obvious foreshadowing. Tongue

I don't see how budget would come into play with this kind of game, much. You need moneys for a) The lives of the guys that make it, handled by other jobs/family/loved ones, b) running their computers, c) the voice actor (if he wasn't one of the game makers, I don't think it was...
After they complete it of course you've got d), publishing, which is by far, I'm sure, where most of the money spent making Penumbra went, printing and shipping out copies to game stores. For actually making the game, if you've got your own computers already, it's not to expensive. Tongue

The game doesn't have orchestrated scores, dozens of voiced characters, high-def pixel perfect FMV's, or motion capping, but it doesn't need any of those things. It came out great the way it is (the soundtrack, voice overs, and cutscenes were absolutely perfect Smile

).

**TheCollective15** · 04-07-2007, 02:55 AM

Yes, I remember finding a rather interesting read about how the money was spent developing Gears Of War...Overture is pretty much the antithesis of such a game, development-wise (being that Gears Of War cost tens of millions to produce, Overture...probably two or three digits less than that... Tongue

), about 20 percent went into programming Gears Of War...25 percent went into art/design...distributing it through retail was about 20 percent...marketing was around 10 percent, etc.

Ah, but in Penumbra: Overture's case, there was no liscensing fee (for using the intellectual property of something like Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars), nor were there any console ownership fees...

All-in-all, the two games are definitely different...I would love to see some statistics concerning Overture in the fiscal department...

Here is the link to the article. http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbo...games.html