So I was reading the comments on the pbot's post about the sketchbook tour, cause I like knowing what people think about my projects. If someone has a suggestion or anything I don't mind hearing it. However there was one comment about how it didn't deserve the score it had, and that was the entire comment. Nothing saying "In my opinion" or any suggestions about how to improve. Anyway I posted a long response about all the work that went into the tour, so I thought I'd post that here rather than let it die in the pbot's post.
At 9/30/07 08:35 AM, Angry-Banana wrote:
Wow The tour was great and all but a 4.30 is WAAAAY to much for something like this.
Do you seriously not understand the amount of work that went into this massive project?
Luis first had to collect about 100 addresses, then send each person a package with the tile and the instructions. Don't forget there's the cost of postage. Over a period of months, Luis had to keep a record of everyone who mailed their tile back in and collaborate them all together. He had to scan each and every one of the 76 tiles that made it back into his computer. Then he drew all the outlines and stuff for the tiles and sent it to pezzo (I believe). Pezzo compiled all the tedious work, like finding the 3 most recent submissions for everyone (3x76 = 228 links that he had to locate), place in the levels and user account links and maps for each person in the tour.
Now we get to my part. When I got the tour file, it was a jumbled mess of frames and outdated actionscript like telltargets (which i left in... no way I'm going to correct 76 lines of tell target code). I was told to code it. Simply rearranging the contents of the fla in order to get it into a codable state took hours. Then coding it took a while to get all the stuff like transitions and the audio switcher and stuff to work right. At this point Luis was editing all the tiles to save file space, along with making a 60x60 image of each tile for the thumbnail view. I had to go and replace all the tiles, then code the thumbnail view of the tiles.
About the thumbnail view, it took 3 freaking hours of tedious copy-paste and rearranging to put the bitmaps into something that would be practical to code. Want to know how boring that is? Open a word processor, type something like "bob1". Now copy that, and replace the 1 with a 2. Do that 76 times. There. That was basically the FIRST step of putting that mess of graphics into something that could be coded. (At this point I added in that Luis easter egg). Coded the thumbnail view. It was a pain but I eventually got it.
Now aside from a whole lot of odds and ends to fix here and there, the next thing I had to do was make 2 minigames. 2. A painter gamer and a slider game that 90% of the people here will never unlock. 2 games that each took a lot of my effort to make. Then putting it into the massively unorganized FLA of the sketchbook tour was a pain. Then I had to code all the easter eggs. Then I had to add swain's voices. Then I had 2 pages of glitches and tweaks that luis sent me to fix.
Add this to the fact that the file takes 15 minutes to export, and that I had to test it approximately 100 times, you end up with about 25 hours spent simply exporting the file.
All this time I could have spent working on something else, something more beneficial to myself like blockslide or something sponsored, or something with at least a link to my website on the main screen. But I chose not to. Know what my reward for all this work was? A t-shirt. That's all I get.
So before you go spewing crap about how it doesn't deserve it's score, take a minute to think about all the sacrifices, time, and tedious work that was spent to make this project so you could enjoy it.
squeakytoad
Didn't read all of it (kind of in a hurry, my apologies) but very true about the effort.
Luis and you guys went through great lengths to get this thing done, and it really shows how much you guys love this community.
Really appreciate the work and effort that you guys spent.
Thanks, man.