> I don't think SOAT will be *that* bad. Think about it: If the difficulty will be indeed something like 40, it will be only like 3.6 times the difficulty rating of POAT.

And that 40 is taking into account that it's much much longer. I don't even know what 3.6 times the difficulty rating should mean (how'd you get 3.6 though?) I think that if you just threw out consideration of a game's length and just based difficulty on how long it takes on average to solve each puzzle (this is still maybe a big ambiguous), then POAT being a 9 would mean SOAT should be about 12 or 13.

>Besides, it will, if grem's estimates are correct, be released in December 2003, giving me something to do with my winter break.

Actually I have no idea which month it would be. If I go on not having a job (or even if I *do* get a job but minimize other distractions instead) I could probably finish by summer. December sounded like a good estimate given that Sam and I will probably test for a month or two before the game is released.

>I think that the difficulty of SOAT is at least a little overrated. If you just take it a little at a time, I bet you'll be done in a few months, and if you really work at it, maybe even a few weeks.

Honestly, yeah. Monkeyman finished POAT in about a day and half, and four more people within a day from that. The code for SOAT will be around 12-15 times as long as that for POAT, but the gameplay time won't be nearly proportionately as long. So an estimate of a couple weeks for SOAT (if you work hard to finish it first) isn't unreasonable. Also, a lot of the game is optional, so you could probably cut that down much more.