I “live in a cave” when it comes to new games. But I ran into this last night and thought it was extremely well done, but heck, what do I know?
It sure is trying to sell milk. Nice 3d scene though.
It definitely shows the power of pre-rendering eh?
@Yoggy: don’t you guys have the “got milk?” ad campaign in the Dakotas? The whole point of the game is to serve as an advertising vehicle (“advergaming”) and as such selling milk is the main purpose for its creation… 
Now I’m off to have me some milk cookies on this fine afternoon, YUM!
Any guesses as to what sort of budget might have been involved to produce a game like this? Are we talking -tens- of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? I’m not really into games of this sort, but I thought it was really well executed.
Sorry, I have no idea on what sort of budget they might have had. The “Got Milk” ad campaign is extremely well funded (TV spots, games, billboards, blah blah blah), I just don’t know what slice of that went into this game.
Yeah, actually I’m more interested in what sort of budget (ie. what it would cost to produce, not necessarilly what a studio might get paid… if you follow what I’m saying). I haven’t been involved in this sort of thing since the early 90’s, and back then we would have definitely gotten over 6 figures for a project like this. I’m just wondering how much cheaper it is today to produce the same thing.
Yeah that ad campaign is everywhere… But I don’t necessarily like it much, because all of the research they quote is obviously very biased. Milk won’t turn you into superman or save you from problems.
I was allergic to lactose when I was younger and so I never drank it and just never have.
Anyway, I can see eating another animal’s meat, and eggs. But milk? That is kind of wierd. :?
Not this much prerendered:
http://www.h4che.com/milk/img/6daysleft_%201.jpg
http://www.h4che.com/milk/img/IMG_8000.JPG
http://www.h4che.com/milk/img/IMG_7690.JPG
And i think it’s pretty obvious that they had a significant budget.
Even if you did it in 3d, not that much has changed since the early 90’s except render time–but that is very much mitigated by new effects. If anything, there is a disproportionately higher expectation now than 10 years ago :roll:
that said–if you have some 3d skills, that level of quality is easily executed by 1 person–it’s only a question of time and schedule
They obviously had a serious budget and are leveraging off production costs for TV spots as well.
If you look at the model Taumel linked we’re talking … a minimum of a person month just for building the terrain from detailed plans (and I’m being optimistic). This was probably all done in California, so we’re not talking cheap labor either.
It surprises me how obscure/difficult a lot of the puzzles are (there’s definitely some bad game design in there, as well as some dodgy decisions – e.g. help keep mom calm while she changes a tire because she has PMS is both a dubious idea for a game and executed quite badly).
My ballpark estimate – for a bare minimum:
2 months of high end Flash coder time.
2 months of building models etc. (but that’s probably a cost they had to bear for the TV spots).
2 months of cgi (the characters are not stop motion)
Double that for random support stuff, pre- and post- production. (Let’s assume they didn’t do much QA )
Assuming ~$100k/year salaries
So that’s about $100,000 absolute minimum. More likely a lot more.
But from my experience of TV advertising in Australia, one high-end ad spot can easily have a post-production budget of $250,000. (I think the company I worked at did one set of ads for Cadbury Chocolate that had a post budget of $350k – although that included frozen pans, which are insanely expensive, even now.) That’s Australia – a market half the size of just California – and just post-production. The actual costs of the shoot, talent, director, etc. will all add up to a lot more than that, so tacking on a bunch of money onto a TV commercial package is probably chump change.
Finally, given the signs of haste/lack of testing in the final product, I’m guessing they went over-budget and rushed the final product out.
I essentially agree except for the “easily” part. The 3D stuff is superb, so is most of the programming and interactivity. The game design seems very uneven (not surprisingly). E.g. I couldn’t solve a single mastermind puzzle, and I doubt their target audience will fare much better.
Note: correction! The spots are live action, not animated (and kind of suck) so that means the entire cost of the model, etc. was borne by the interactive… It means that not only did the interactive need to pay to build and film the model, they needed to design and plan it too. Ouch.
Terrible ad campaign. Cute game.
Good grief, how much loading time? Seemed like every time I breathed on it, it counted down from 99 again.
Thank you for sharing this flash site, what an amazing portfolio piece for the flash guy and a massive failure for the client… The real genius of the project was getting the client to spend over 1 million bucks on a flash game, pure genius.
I enjoyed seeing this because it reminds me of why I’m making games in Unity and have ditched my attempts to make pathetic games in flash… No more fooling around in AS3 for weeks to make a 60 polygon rhino spin in 3D and completely peg a dual-core CPU.
Could you imagine what could be done in Unity with just 1/10 the budget of that game …
Beside of that the game was an advertisement success it’s fun to play, has a very nice visual style and a great but bad looped tune. Stop Motion, Augsburger Puppenkiste and Sandman forever!
Nice game. I made it to the glass!
There are much worse things to advertise: cigarettes, alcohol, coke So I suppose milk is a fine thing to be promoted to in a game.
Although, lately I do prefer good Ontario Goats Milk myself. When I think of what cow’s milk is supposed to do (turn a baby calf into a big fat cow), I think I’d prefer to aim for a goat size lol.
-Whystler