Poll - Time to complete a game?

[bentlegen]

Hey all,

First off, let me introduce myself. I'm a younger (early-20's) programmer from Canada who's looking to get something started on his own. I've been lurking on your forums for a little while, and I'd just like to say you've got a great little community here.

I was just curious. For those of you who have completed self-published games out there, how long (on average) does it take you to go from conception to completion? Maybe include an estimate of hours, as I realize a lot of people here do this part-time. I'm just curious just what kind of commitment I'd have to put in myself in order to complete my own realization.

Thanks,
- ben

[oNyx]

An average puzzle game prototype takes some hours and a cutting the edge first person shooter would take a single person more than 100 years (working fulltime) - if the available tech stays the same.

Most indy games take 2 weeks to 2 years and they are done by 1 to 10 people.

And most games take much longer than expected.

I'm wondering why you ask. Have you ever done a little game before? If not... well, do it. Get some experience and some feeling about how long such stuff takes. Extrapolate and multiply with 2 and you have a rough figure about how long it might take.

Just get it rolling. The longer you hestiate the more you'll regret your slowness ;)

[James C. Smith]

The games we make at Reflexive (downloadble games such as Swarm, Ricochet, Wik, and Big Kahuna Reef) are all made in 3 to 6 months. We are trying to keep it at round 4 months or less. Big Kahuna Reef was going to be an 8 week game but it turned into a little more than 3 months.

[Jack Norton]

My games takes up to 2-3 months to make... effective time :) when I have other things to do, or I am far from home takes longer. My current one is in development since 20th of september... argh I'm late :(

[Chris Evans]

My first game took about 11 months. My second game, which is a small little game is almost complete. It'll probably end up at around 1.5 months total development time.

After my current game, I want to shift to 3-4 month projects until I have a library of about 5 games. At that point I'll asses whether to embark on another big project. Big projects are physically and emotionally draining. :) Doing a couple of smaller games will give me a nice break while at the same time build up our software library.

[luggage]

Snowball Frenzy took 10 days (and it shows :) ).

Puzzle Word took about a month for the first version and another couple of weeks for the online version.

Party Bowling took about 2 months in total. Ended up taking longer as we got sidetracked onto other paying projects.

[ggambett]

Betty's Beer Bar -> 5 months initially, a total of 6 or 7 adding all the improvements and fixes since its launch 13 months ago

FaceIt -> 5 weeks

<current project> -> already 6 months :(

[Teq]

My first *reasonable* game (excluding those ikkle text based ones I wrote on my Atari XE) took about 6 weeks to write, but then the graphics were very basic so I didn't have to worry about that to much. These days I couldn't honestly say how long I have put into my games because I keep getting asked to do other work which takes me away from them :(

[BantamCityGames]

Werlin took over a year, and Invadazoid is about 6 months already, but these numbers are useless really unless you know how many people are working on a game and how many man-hours they are putting in each month. I know Reflexive for instance has at least a few full-timers which changes what the month figures mean. For Werlin, I'd say I have ~800 man hours (me being the only worker). And Invadazoid gets about 10 hours a week out of me so thats about 260 hours so far with probably another 100 to go.

[tentons]

I'm almost done with my first game, and it has take almost a year exactly. A lot of time was spent on research since I was trying out various languages and platform choices. I settled on what I know best: C++ and Windows. I expect to keep improving the game for at least another year by polishing and refinement while I work on the next game.

[Chaster]

Spellunker took us 11 months. It was supposed to take 6, and it initially DID, but then we found out that the graphics weren't good enough so spent another 5 months completely redoing the graphics... doh. (my artist is a good guy, but ummm, let's just say he is still learning what "high quality" means..)

I'm sure our next game will take a year to complete too... oh well.. At least our games are getting better... LOL..

[Mark Currie]

nearly five years

[Dan MacDonald]

Mark and I both have projects that have run for 5 years. I also released a smaller game during that time that took about 4 months to complete.

[papillon]

1 to 8 months.

[Mark Fassett]

Derelict took nearly 16 months.

[princec]

6 months for Alien Flux, 6 months for Super Dudester, both part time after-work sort of affairs.

Cas :)

[FlySim]

9 months for FlySim - part time - 2 people.
We were planning 3 months for our next one - but contract
work got in the way and that one will take 9+ months :eek:

-J.R.
www.flysim.com

[C_Coder]

Already 9 months... :eek:

[Evak]

with 2 people and a lot of hours avaliable I like 3-6 months total development time. Mainly because its hard to keep moral up if your working for nothing and you can get an awful lot done if when the game is fresh and everyone is into it. Often after this period there may be another 1-2 months of tweaking and polish which is more sedate and experimental with testers.

If I had a larger team and people were being paid I'd be more interested in expanding the time and adding more depth to the title and pushing for some of those features that you really want to put in but can't justify.

[Teq]

Spellunker took us 11 months. It was supposed to take 6, and it initially DID, but then we found out that the graphics weren't good enough so spent another 5 months completely redoing the graphics... doh.

I know that feeling all to well, finished the developer release of Crystal Crash and it played really well, but looked sodding aweful, so since then we've been working on prettying it up a little (well a lot)

[20thCenturyBoy]

nearly five years
:eek:

You are George Broussard and I claim my $5.