Bookworm Adventures (affectionately referred to as BWA) is so far the most ambitious of all our titles produced. It took about 2.5 years to complete this beast and is so far our largest game by file size, clocking in around 20MB compressed. The game utilized a plethora of new technology that hadn't been tested previously. There was much hoopla over the whole $750,000 cost thing but it's actually not very amazing at all. There were 4 people full time on this project (myself, Tysen Henderson, Bill Olmstead, Stephen Notley). Then, there was the QA staff of which we had 5, and later we involved some of our Dublin, Ireland staff. Then there were a host of other people who worked on the game in bits and pieces. The $750K is $300K per year. If you ignored the rest of the staff and only focussed on the 4 main people, that would be a salary of $75K/year per person. That number drops once you factor in all the other people involved. Thus, as you can see, this cost really isn't anything interesting and just simply comprises the total salary cost of everyone that worked on the game (in Economist terms, "man hours"). We hardly spent anything on other elements. BWA was the first game in which I played such an active role in production and game design. The art direction and production/design was spearheaded by Tysen Henderson. BWA went through several major revisions before turning into what it is today.

The subpages are taken from the post mortem that Tysen and I wrote. Tysen wrote the bulk of the design/production parts, I wrote the bulk of the engineering parts. It's an interesting story about what worked and what didn't over the 2.5 years of developing this beast. Thirty months, 150,000 lines of code and 4,500 images later, Bookworm Adventures was realized. We are all extremely proud of Lex and BWA, and are especially pleased by its reception and success.  In the first 45 days of its release Bookworm Adventures made more revenue than any other PopCap title in the same amount of time (Yes, including Bejeweled 2!).  With those numbers and other more intangible measures of success, we think we can safely say that our "Good" choices — and even the "Not Bad" ones — have more than made up for our "Ugly" ones.