First Game

[Juridz28]

How long did it take you to make your first game??? And any ideas to make on your first game??

 

[mlogan]

I've moved this thread to General Discussion. Please be sure to post your threads in the correct forum next time. Thank you.

 

[Kes]

You might find that the posts in the following topics have a lot of information and advice which is applicable to your situation:


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/70731-teach-me-how-to-start-learning-to-become-a-jack-of-all-trades-in-rpg-making/


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/70508-a-question-about-development/


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/70491-character-creation-tip/


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/69167-how-to-start-a-game/


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/67784-how-do-you-come-up-with-game-ideas/


http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/69150-story-vs-battle/


Actually if you go through this forum you will find a great many other threads which relate to your question and which, perhaps, you might benefit from.

 

[watermark]

A general rule of thumb:


20 hours = first hour of ok game.


200 hours = first hour of good (or at least pretty decent) game.


After that it's about:
1 hour = 1 hour of average gameplay.


4 hours = 1 hour of good gameplay.


Why so much on the first hour? Because it takes very long to setup everything: database, actors, items, monsters, battle system, basic story outline, etc. It's actually like 80% of your game there.


Or you can always do:


10 minutes = 1 hour of people gonna flame you to death for monster spamming/dumb design/totally bad but you don't really care cause it's just crappy gameplay

 

[KesoChodar]

The first and only game i've ever finished took me about 10 months.


It was so horrible i deleted everything about it and ate broken glass and rusted nails for 3 weeks. 

 

[HexMozart88]

It took a summer vacation for me to make a game, which is around two months. It was really horrible though, as is with most first games. Try to take it easy and don't have too high of expectations or there's a ninety-five percent chance you'll be disappointed. 

 

[Crabs]

I made my first game on RM in two days. Pretty simple 10 minute puzzle game with parallax mapping and no plugins.

 

[Lihinel]

My first trash game took me about 2 weeks for 1 hour, was mainly done to get to know ruby.


The one after that about 1 month for a 15-20 min short game.


Now I am at 50-80 hours or more input for 15 min - 1 hour of gameplay. Though I hope to get a lot more done later on when all systems and databases are established.

 

[bgillisp]

Took me one week and I was 12. Though it wasn't in RM (DBGames I think was the engine I used for it?). Let's just say I had no idea what I was doing, but decided to take every neat feature of all RPG games I'd played to date (all 3 or so of them) and one up them. Had no story, no idea what you were doing, it was just wander through the 40 - 50 maps I made, survive, and defeat the final boss eventually.


I'm glad that abomination only exists on 5.25 inch floppies so there is no way I can show the world it anymore.

 

[Pierman Walter]

I made one a few years ago that took about ten hours. All the sprites were terribly edited so that all armor, shields, magic symbols, statues, and everything else had a butt on it.

 

[Adam1013]

My first real game I made is a fan game with RMMV called Final Fantasy Braver in the Project Development section of the forums with a demo posted. Took me about a year to finish and I still have some finishing touches to do before I release the full.


The game has about 7-10 hours of story and tons of side content.


Ive had many projects started but this is the only one ive come close to legitimately finishing. Soooo many hours and notebooks...


I learned a lot from this project and Im better prepared to work on my next one now. 

 

[Frogboy]

Still working on my first RPG Maker game although I've been on a break for about 6 months now.  I do set realistic goals but I also have a little bit of a perfectionist in me so the game will never be done until I'm proud to call it my own.  Ran into some design issues that I just recently solved and am hoping to get back to it.  I wouldn't expect to see anything from me for a little while longer.  I will finish it, though ... and it will be fun.

 

[AMGLime]

My first game was an FF6 Fan Game on RM2k. It took me forever to make and it was only about 20 minutes long once you cut out the battles, it was terrible. I played around with RM2k3 a lot as well, but mostly been absent from the scene, dabbling with VX Ace a bit here and there, the current project has been in development for awhile and I've only recently started doing actual client work on it.

 

[sabao]

My first RPG Maker game took about 2-3 months to put together. It was a 20-minute demo. I can't really remember why I never finished it.

 

[BrandedTales]

First game in RM took about 15is hours to make, and resulted in about 15-20 minutes of actual game play.


That doesn't count the 30-40 hours of watching tutorials on a variety of subjects (newbie tutorials, eventing, parallax mapping, etc).  It does however include time spent on attempting to implement a feature (such as active battle system or parallax maps), and then backing down from then based on the decision that this was a first game.  Plus tons of plugin troubleshooting.