They have provided Multiplayer an exclusive breakdown of how much room everything from the explosions to the theme song to Captain Nemo’s submarine occupy in their nearly 50 MB game (49832KB).
I think they wanted to show off, because their game packs a lot for being just a Live Arcade download: 15 levels single and co-op campaign, a storyline, 16-player multiplayer modes. How’d they cram it all in?
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* Environment art (this includes the structural meshes and graphical textures for all the fish, rocks, seaweed and other art repeated throughout the levels; as opposed to “level” data which represents level-specific structure, lighting details, collision information and artificial intelligence pathways for any non-player-controlled characters) — 8028 KB.
* Foreign languages (”Undertow” ships with nine language) — 383 KB.
* Explosions (a subset of effects, which altogether comprise 10% of the game) — 759 KB.
* Xbox data (icons for Achievements and programming to hook the game into the Xbox 360 system) — 545KB, or 1% of the game.
The single biggest file in “Undertow,” according to technical director Geremy Mustard, is the game’s theme song, which is 499KB, or 1% of the game. The second biggest is the font used for the optional Chinese version of the game’s text.
The smallest file is the seaweed which, as Geremy puts it, “undulates on the sea floor.” He said it “takes up 196 bytes (0.19KB), which is 0.00038% of the entire game size.”
Geremy said Captain Nemo’s submarine takes of 220KB. The human diver you play as at the beginning of the game is 60KB.
