estimating play through time

rooster

I'm designing some gameplay for something atm, it's a platform game with a twist.. but having a bit of trouble estimating play through time or how much effort it's going to take to generate for example one hours worth of content.

are there any designers or level designers out there that have some thoughts? I understand there's no hard rules and it's all guestimation, but I would appreciate any info on the matter whatsoever. How do you design a set ammount of hours gameplay.. (I'm not as concerned with asset creation, I can estimate that roughly)

its a nebulous question I know, but worth a shot

Eric Chadwick

Play a similar game and time yourself.
That's my guess.

Vailias

minimum completion distance travel/character speed = minimum time to play through

hardly anyone will bother with that unless you add in a level timer score (see goldeneye and perfect dark), but the average joe gamer would be somewhere between 2-5 times that amount of time.

Baddcog

I've done quite a few levels for Thief II. These are fairly intensive levels to design. Alot of thought has to be put into player/AI interaction, AI patrols, lighting/shadows, readables, object/loot/ placement,texture alignment, ect...

Plus I always make/texture custom objects and sometimes AI,
then there's beta testing to make sure it works right before release...

Quite a bit more than an Unreal map where the players are all just running around shooting.

gameplay time always varies from level to level and player to player.
Generally on my larger levels I have spent 6 months, not just a few hours here and there but second job kindof six months.
They generally take players 2-6 hours to complete depending on how thorough the player is and their playing style.

For a multi-player UT/Quake map you might be looking at 2-3 months to build a really nice and fun to play map. Of course the play time on those is something like 2 minutes per round.