How long?

[Torisu]

Hey guys!

Just general discussion thread.

How long do you think a good quality game should take to develop?

I know some game makers who made games within 8 months or even 3 keeping tight, mind you a few of these games were sequels that kept a lot of different things in the previous version.

I dont like making targets for myself but I would prefer not take longer than over a year.

 

[TheoAllen]

If my game took 2 years to complete since the initial start but i spent my one year idling. Is that one year project or 2 years project?

 

[bgillisp]

Depends on many factors, including:

-How much time you can commit every day.
-How long the game is
-How complex the game is

We usually say it takes about 100 hours to make 1 quality hour of playtime. Granted, that will vary some, but the first few hours will take the longest, and the last few the least.

To give you an idea, my game has taken 57 months so far. My playtester took about 40 hours to beat it. Steam says I'm at about 7000 hours in RPGMaker now.

 

[MushroomCake28]

Like bgillisp said, it depends on many things (length of your game, complexity of it, number of people working on it, creating all assets or buying some, etc.).

The 100 hours of making for 1 hour of gameplay is a general rule. The first 100 hours you put in might not even result in gameplay. For example, I started by creating the systems (menus, skills, abilities, database, etc.). That takes time and is necessary, but won't create any direct gameplay. I then coded my battle system, which takes time and doesn't result in direct gameplay time. However, once those things are done, I don't need to redo them later, so the time I spend on events and maps, the ratio is much better than 100:1. So it's really just a general rule (take all the time you took to develop everything, and divide it by the gameplay time) that isn't a really good predictor of quality.

 

[bgillisp]

@MushroomCake28 : True. I think the first 4000 hours I used to make the first 5 hours of my game, due to all the work on the database, setting up the battle system, trying some things, learning they didn't work, fixing them, etc. So the first hour might even take longer than that, especially when learning the engine.

Though for IGMC2014 I think I spent about 170 hours or so on the engine in those 4 weeks, and did get over an hour of gameplay. Now whether it was an hour of good gameplay...

 

[JessieK]

In a project, I lay out a year plan, very brief with targets at the end of each month and some sort of end goal.

Sometimes that's a finished game, sometimes that's a fully playable demo, a year for RPG maker seems like a good amount if you're creating all your own assets and what not. If its just a project for fun, then time doesn't really matter, take 5 years, the important part is you enjoy it.

 

[Torisu]

In a project, I lay out a year plan, very brief with targets at the end of each month and some sort of end goal.

Sometimes that's a finished game, sometimes that's a fully playable demo, a year for RPG maker seems like a good amount if you're creating all your own assets and what not. If its just a project for fun, then time doesn't really matter, take 5 years, the important part is you enjoy it.

Yes, I would like to not think about time and enjoy the process, one thing I love and planning to do is for the credits i'll have process pictures of the many different stages it took to make the game!