Hours and hours and hours

General Discussions
#1

A thought that’s been bouncing around my head recently:

Everyone always massively underestimates how long it’s going to take to finish making a game. You start on a project that you think will take a couple of weeks, and after a few months of hard slog all you’ve got is a crummy-looking tech demo, so you give up and start a different project instead.

What if, when you first have an idea for a game, you could plausibly estimate how long it would take to turn that idea into reality? How would that affect the projects you take on?

So what I’m thinking is, how about we make a list of example development times for different types of games? To kick things off, here are some of mine:

Starbugs (a basic Galaxians clone) - 80 hours
Bug Bomb (a basic Scramble clone) - 250 hours
Bunny Golf (a simple mini-golf game) - 450 hours

Note 1. I’m only thinking about finished games here. (And by finished I mean properly finished, not just abandoned.) Knowing how long it takes to make something half-finished isn’t that useful when half-finished might actually mean tenth-finished or hundredth-finished.

Note 2. The number of hours is a very, very rough guess. I know rough start and end dates for the projects, and I’m assuming 10 hours of work per week (evenings and weekends) which is a balance between a typical productive week (20 hours work) and a typical not-so-productive week (ten minutes work).

Is this sort of thing useful? Does anyone else want to share development times?

Simon

#2

Titan Attacks: about 12 man months
Ultratron: about 10 man months (so far)
Droid Assault: about 18 man months
Revenge of the Titans: about 8 man years.

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Man month = 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?

Quick sums:
Titan Attacks: 2080 hours
Ultratron: 1730 hours
Droid Assault: 3120 hours
Revenge of the Titans: 16,640 hours

Just for comparison. :wink:

#4

Hard to compare without knowing more details.
Like developer’s experience, game features and usage of external libraries.
Maybe someone implemented a neural network better than that of Ltd. Commander Data while the other one is just rolling the dices ;D
Or multi player vs. single player.

#5

Man-month = more like 150 hours or so for us.
So:
Titan Attacks: 1680 hours
Ultratron: 1500 hours
Droid Assault: 2700 hours
Revenge of the Titans: 14400 hours

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

Looking at our games you can get a pretty good idea of a) how much work really goes into an actual finished product (and what’s in a finished product) and b) just how slow we are. It’d be nice if we were quicker but we have an arcane style that’s quite labour intensive, and we’ve got absolutely no natural talent in game design - at least 50% of the development time (both code and graphics) is just testing ideas and throwing them out again afterwards.

Right now I spend about 50% of my actual time “developing” simply playtesting to make sure stuff is good.

Cas :slight_smile:

#7

Of course any quoted development times are going to be very, very woolly, and I wouldn’t read too much into them. But I’d argue that things like developer’s experience and choice of tools are actually minor factors compared to the overall size/quality of the game being developed. (And let’s assume that we’re talking about developers who are sane enough not to spend ten years implementing something that could’ve been done in ten minutes. :wink: )

#8

Are you basing this on hard evidence?
I’d sort of assumed that everyone felt that way. :persecutioncomplex:

#9

Some developers really are genuinely talented in the area of game design, and prolific. See our very own Kev Glass and Markus Persson. They knock out really nice ideas in a trice. Unfortunately I’m not like that - most of my ideas are rubbish and take months of experiments before they end up with something good enough.

Cas :slight_smile:

#10

I wish I could work with you princec, I think I have plenty of good ideas but I have very little experience in programming games.
I guess I’m more of the designer type more of the coder one. I came with pretty fun ideas every week and I started writting them down 'cause I think they may be good to develop someday!

#11

I have 1,000,000 ideas. Unfortunately I only have 2 hands and most of the time it seems they are used to bat off my pesky children. What I need is a miserably subservient autistic savant programmer who obeys my every whimsy and is paid in magic beans. And a clone of Chaz.

Cas :slight_smile:

#12

[quote=“princec,post:11,topic:38890”]
I’ll take 3 please.

Endolf

#13

Seems like what you primarily need is one of these two things:

  1. an office away from home
  2. a door with a lock :slight_smile:

Or go crazy, both!

#14

I do wish I had the sort of money to burn to rent an office but as it’d only be me working alone there I’d be incredibly lonely. It’s already pretty lonely upstairs in my man cave. Sometimes I welcome being hassled by the kids.

Cas :slight_smile:

#15

[quote=“princec,post:11,topic:38890”]
Hey! I’m doing my best here! xD

#16

@OP
I want to see your starbugs in applet but it lies >:(
Love your quote, “homemade games” like cookies or candies 8) I wanna adopt that words.

#17

Lies? You mean it hangs?

That’s annoying. If it’s purely an applet problem then maybe the old webstart link will still work. (I did see applets hanging on a Windows/IE9 machine recently. It seemed that the browser plugin was completely broken - even the Oracle “which version of Java do I have” applet was hanging. Updating the plugin fixed that.)

Ah well, I guess we’re all used to applet problems by now. :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for trying it though. It does rather undermine the original discussion if I’m quoting development times for games no one can play.

Simon

#18

@dismouth
no, your button says applet but when I clicked it a jar file thrown (not that I don’t like desktop though) :slight_smile:

#19

Ah, I see. What a shame. I’m using a plugin that’s supposed to handle applets correctly - and clearly it’s not doing its job. What OS/browser are you using? (The plugin does say it requires Javascript, but that’s always present these days, isn’t it?)

Simon

#20

Among certain groups of people it has a good chance of being disabled though.

Endolf