> I'm not sure, but isn't there a level editor integrated in super tux?
> I think the final version of retux will probably be very similar to what
somebody could have done with this level editor except of some minor
differences that don't really matter (at least to me and, so is my guess, to
many other players).
SuperTux has a level editor, though it's a separate program written in C#
now. However, just using the level editor wouldn't have been sufficient. If I
had based the game on SuperTux, I would have had to make engine changes,
because I can't stand some of the design choices in the core of SuperTux's
engine. (You might think of them as minor, but I think of some of them as
fundamental flaws. They're little things, but they pile up.) Additionally,
since SuperTux is in an alpha state, I would have had to fix problems in the
existing engine anyway. I decided that starting over with the SGE Game Engine
wouldn't be any more difficult, might even be easier, and would give me a
chance to make the SGE Game Engine more mature, something else I wanted to
do.
> 50 000 dollar for this sounds unachievable;
> 500 maybe, but i wish you the best.
$500 would be nowhere near enough for this size of a game even if I were just
making the levels. At $10 an hour (slightly more than minimum wage where I
live, but easier to do math with than $8.15), each level would only get a
little more than an hour of work, on average. This isn't even taking into
account making the maps (which doesn't take a huge amount of time, but does
take some), and testing. The only way you could possibly do it that fast is
if the levels are so terribly rushed that you aren't putting any thought into
them, and you don't test them much. The game would succumb to repetition and
other design problems because of this, and the lack of testing would almost
certainly mean design problems would slip through.
For just the levels, if you want them to be good, I'd roughly estimate about
2 months of full-time work, total. At $10 an hour, that's about $3200. That's
a bare minimum.
For the entirety of reTux, but not including whatever the cost of hiring an
artist will be, I roughly estimate the bare minimum to be about $10,000 (or,
about 4 months of full-time work for the engine, at about $10 an hour).
That's why I said I'd consider $10,000 to be a success, but not successful
enough for me to quit my day job over.
