Comrades! This long-awaited moment, when we can blame all of you for this, has finally come. Yes, comrades, it’s a straight fact— there would be no Man without you! During the development of the game, you’ve been by our side, you’ve been helping us, criticizing us, giving us advice, and breaking the game. You’ve taken an integral part in the development of Breathedge, and we hope that we’ve met your expectations at least a little (and if we haven’t, then we don’t know anything, never heard of anything, and we’ve got nothing to do with it). Anyway, starting from today, Breathedge is officially a completely finished, full-fledged game. Yes, we’ll add a tiny bit of gameplay as post-release content. Maybe some hotfixes will be needed because instead of v. 1.0 we’ve uploaded 3 GB of the scriptwriter’s private photos, but it’s not that important right now. What’s important is the fact that the release has finally happened. In honor of this, we even recorded the longest trailer in human history (according to our artist, and he usually lies).
https://youtu.be/58XGHeVuT7k
Overall, we could finish our news here, but we’d like to tell you about the project in numbers a little. If you don’t like numbers, you can imagine cute little turtles instead of them. Turtle-based math is more friendly than the usual one.
The first number that is worth mentioning is the date of the beginning of the development: August 9, 2017. On that date, the very first document with the ideas about the future game was created. It consisted mainly of the programmer’s stream of consciousness. Quote:
“A berry gatherer, a quantum burp, hero destabilization, eversion of mackerel, a big mansion, a wild dog, a train of wind, red loafers, hoof health, a chicken’s sorrow, a mother’s leash, Stalin’s glade, a local historian prophet, a voodoo bard, a water fly, pigfall, a peach crutch, mitten sales, an enterprise of courage, products of sorrow, a head valley, drill the shrimp in, sales palm, a crowd of ronins, banning of thyme, creatures have fallen asleep, romance frigate, the miser and the flea»
Phew, so many brilliant ideas. You can take any of them for your projects if you like — we don’t mind.
After a brainstorm session, dull work on the analysis of trends, genres, ways of monetization, and counting the amount of detergent needed for inspiration, slowly but surely we came up with a survival game in space. So, on August 20, 2017, Breathedge had its very first concept, which marked the beginning of the entire visual part of the game, as well as Man’s appearance.
At first, Breathedge was intended to be a serious game in a strict Soviet visual style about a man who gets into a space catastrophe and wants to get to his quarrelsome wife who was flying with him. But then we slept it off, and we got what we got. We’re sorry.
Anyway, let’s get back to numbers. So, what have we done with our team of 5-8-15 people? (We can’t count all those who had something to do with the game.) Let’s take out our colorful plastic toy abacus and see...
- The game’s script is 43,621 words. Most of the words are obscene. But that’s nothing. This is how the scriptwriter sees it.
- We voiced 1,377 lines for different characters in the game. 1,253 lines belong to the Spacesuit. The longest line lasts 76,833122 seconds, which can put even the most patient players into a coma. So be careful.
- In addition to all the characters’ babbling, the game has 497 sound files, from the sound of footsteps to the "Tachanka" song.
- The game contains 2,722 models (Man, the Chicken, debris, food, tools, a planet, etc.). There is a possibility that some of these models are just junk that was not included in the game. But we tried to keep the project clean, so there aren’t many directories like "New folder — New folder 2 — Delete on release — New folder 3” in the project.
- Apart from the models, textures are also an important part of the game. There are 4,129 of them. You might ask, why are there so few textures, considering that usually, one model requires at least three texture maps, and 4,129 - 2,722 ≠ 3 (sort of)? Well, that's because... Well, yeah, just because. In fact, for the sake of optimization, many models contain the same set of textures, where the most important texture is a field divided into colored squares. Almost every debris in the game world, all buildings, vehicles, ships, and interiors have such textures. At the same time, a very large part of the textures relates to various icons and inventory items. Therefore, in fact, 2,722 models in the game have at best a quarter of the project’s textures.
- Of all the richness of textures, the game has 146 textures localized into 11 languages. We tried to localize various newspapers, screens, packages, calendars, and, in general, any objects containing text. It is difficult and time-consuming, but now you can complete Breathedge in the unfamiliar and beautiful Japanese language, having an unforgettable experience and a complete lack of understanding of what is going on. Isn’t it wonderful? (for our readers from Japan, we advise you to mentally replace part of the previous sentence "... beautiful Japanese" with "... beautiful ________ language”, substituting any unfamiliar language from the list of available ones in the empty field).
- In Breathedge, you can find 107 different effects (particles), from explosions and projectiles to explosions and other projectiles. We have no idea where exactly are these 107 effects, but they are there.
- We are also proud of our set of 380 unique and weird animations. Any complex hand movement is a unique animation, and, usually, two people (an active and a passive animator) worked hard to make it. You can’t find such job positions on any job search sites, but we have them in our studio.
- There are 442 blueprint classes in total. Anyone familiar with Unreal Engine 4 knows that blueprints are simplified rendered pieces of game code. A module, as a building element, consists of several walls, ceilings, floors, and light sources. At the same time, each of the walls is interactive and has its own logic of interaction in the game. All this is collected in one blueprint. Whoop-dee-doo, our long years of work are described in just one ridiculous sentence. Apart from blueprints, there is a lot of C++ code in the game, but it’s impossible to count all the handwritten lines.
- Instead of counting the lines of code, we decided to test the programmer's work in another way. We took a grinder, some pliers, and a magnifying glass, and calculated that the programmer had 1,071,020,491 dead neurons. Stress, comrades, and a lot of work.
- So many numbers. But what about our sales, popularity, money, and shares? Where did we get the money to buy a cruise liner for $79,411,764? Everything is much more complicated here. Nobody, especially our pride, will allow us to tell the exact numbers, but you can find this data in open sources. The range will be as thus: from 100 to 400 thousand players got the game in one way or another. In general, this range is quite close to reality, but it’s already difficult to calculate our earnings even for us. How many copies of the game were distributed to streamers, testers, and the media? How many were sold, in what period, at what price, and at what discounts? How many players requested a refund? How much in taxes did we pay? What were the stores’ fees, technology royalties, bank commissions? How much did we spend on advertising, programs, development, people? Who knows? Let's just multiply 400k players by $25 per copy and get $10 million and be happy rich guys! Woo, let's have a party! (By the way, even this is not enough to buy a liner =( )
Well, that's all. So much useless information. We’ve released the game, calculated all the numbers, so what's next? Well, now we have to complete all our work on porting the game to consoles and the release on them (we will announce the date of this separately), make the promised add-on to Breathedge (it’s free, small, and beautiful, like a ripe wombat), and perhaps, something else, but that’s not for certain. So it goes.
And as usual, you can send all your wishes, doubts, and demands, including more accurate calculations based on our incomprehensible figures, by mail or discord. We always read everything and draw our conclusions.
Our Discord:
https://discord.gg/uezQcU7
Our email:
[email protected]
