Dragon Commander: The Cost of Dialogue
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The egg of it is that we've been making some fuzz about all the choices and consequences in Dragon Commander. Right now however, all these choices & consequences only exist as text. And now we need to find a cost-effective way of translating all that text into animated dialogue.
Obviously, we also want whatever dialogue animation we put in the game to be as good as possible, so everybody's saying have you seen LA Noire ? And I say, yeah I've seen it.
Then I think of Divinity II - the Ego Draconis part, remembering that the voice recordings, lip-synchronization and associated dialogue animations required an intense piece of work, so I ask Benoit, the producer who was responsible for that, exactly how much voice did we have?
He tells me, over 9.5 hours of voice recordings, per language, but he phrases it as over 34000 seconds, just to make sure I'm well aware of what I'm asking for. I guess he emphasized the seconds bit because he's seen me talk to a variety of people in the team about how to handle the performance capturing, and nightmares of the past came back to him.
So I tell him, well take those timings as a reference, I have no clue how much dialogue we're going to have in Dragon Commander, but it's going to be a ton. Find out what the best solutions are for this, and let me know the cost.
I'm sure he's going to come back with a 6 digit number, hopefully one we can manage. I also curse. Curse that this is going to cost me man-years of development that I could otherwise put into extra features, but knowing full well that if I don't, the game won't be taken seriously. At least not by that group of critics that demand that games have the same production values like the ones on display in the best AAA productions.
