Evaluating the time it takes to create a game ?

Valerien

Hi everyone,

I'm creating a firm right now, in France. We're making 2d games right now, but as I'm more experienced in 3d, I was wondering if we could make games using udk (we're 3 persons working together) like Amnesia, or a platformer/adventure gameplay (no ennemies) with such a small workforce ? I know what it takes to build a level, animate, integrate in unreal but for the scripting part...

Thanks in advance.

cholden

Well, it's all up to scope and who's doing it

Hourences taught a class on using UDK and the student teams has to make a game in 4 weeks. Here's the results
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=764438
I post it as it's a good sample of a variety of games using UDK in a short time.

Personally, I've been making my own adventure game for some time. Usually one or two nights a week(end), but still plowed through it pretty fast.

A single (demo) level shouldn't take more than a month to be playable with all your basic gameplay elements in place. Three months is enough time for that demo to be a polished, professional looking demo.

Oniram

at my school we have a set of classes based around creating a game demo. the time spent on the overall process is in total 1 year. a lot of which i think is too much time wasted. its separated as follows: (in quarters)

1: Interactive Game Prototyping - we spend time creating a back story for the game. characters, environment, etc. They generally want to see a lot of planning and pre-thought in this stage, ultimately they are looking for a design doc for the game.

2. Advanced Game Prototyping/Project Planning - this quarter is exactly the same as the first, except they added a second class to divy up the work between team members, set deadlines, etc.. all to be followed for the next quarters. My team and i basically said "screw this" and we just started working.. we didnt care about the design doc as much as we did the work itself, so we used what time we had here to start working on props n whatnot.

3. Game Production 1 - here they wanted us starting to work.. a bit late in the game id say. By this time my team had already had a playable working demo, but we needed to refine some stuff a bit, so we did extra characters and weapons and focused a lot on the gameplay aspect, since we didnt want it to play like UT3.

4. Game Production 2 - basically to the administrators at my school, by here they want teams in beta.. working out bugs and what not, but truth be told NO ONE has ever made it here and said "ok we're done with assets." usually teams dont even finish by the end of this class and end up almost failing.. my team however (since we started early) is entering this class in 1 week, with all of our art done.. focusing on level layout, scripting, and all the technical work afterward.


while i agree with the school that a lot of planning is needed, i do not think it should take 1 year to make a fully playable demo. a big problem we encountered was originally having a 9 person team (while most teams are only made of 3 or 4), we realized that 3 of the members were not cutting it. They missed deadlines, had bad work, etc, so we cut them from the group halfway into quarter 2 (our busiest quarter). their work had to be made up for but we got it done.

4 of the remaining team members have told me that after we graduate in 6 months, we would like to take the time to really push out a simple game. something like what you are talking about, such as a platformer/adventure or even just a simple 2d sidescrolling beatem up should take no longer than a few months at most. just as long as there is someone giving a constant demand for work. what we saw at one point a couple months ago was some people just getting lazy and that dragged the whole team down. if everyone is dedicated to it, it can get done in a timely manner.

Valerien

Thanks a lot for your answers. I think we'll stick to 2d games for now, as it only takes us several days to make a working prototype.