RM Community Game Completion Poll

[Dark Horseman]

Curious how far most of the community's games are coming along and get an idea how long it takes on average to finish a project. If anyone's willing to post the length of time or estimate of the number of hours to complete their game, that'd be helpful, too.

 

[bgillisp]

Well, for me I've been working on mine for a year, and I budgeted 3 years, and the game is about 25 - 33% done, so I'd say that is accurate. But my game is heavy on the story, so that is slowing it down. I think if I had done a dungeon crawler I'd be about done by now.

As for time, I do most of my work on Friday/Saturday's or Thursday/Saturday's, depending on when my off days are from work. So take 2 days a week * 8 * + another 4 - 8 hours randomly thrown in here and there, that's, let's say a total of 20 hours a week * 52 weeks = 1,040 hours so far, and I estimate it will be 3 times that when done.

 

[Matseb2611]

I've completed around 10 or so games now (not counting the small XP games I made years back). The longest one so far has been Atonement, which is roughly 10+ hours of content and took me about 8 months to do.

In general the development time is affected by a lot of things for me.

- More custom content = more development time.

- More unique mechanics (like in battles or for puzzles) = more development time.

- Dungeon crawlers take less time for me because you don't need to worry about mapping cities, adding NPCs, and developing much of a plot.

- Linear games take less development time than non-linear games of the same length.

In case you're curious of a more in-depth breakdown of how long each game took me to make, then open the spoiler:

Spoiler

1. My first Ace game that shall remain unnamed - 1 month of development, ~4 hours in length and fully RTP.

2. Dreadmurk - 2-3 months of development, ~8 hours in length, mostly RTP, standard linear JRPG.

3. Incitement - 6-7 months of development, ~7-10 hours long, used custom sci-fi resources in RTP style mostly, mostly linear JRPG.

4. Central Impulse - 3-4 months of development, ~3-4 hours long, custom sci-fi resources in RTP style, linear, but has heavy emphasis on puzzles and mini-games.

5. Unrevealed - 1 month of development (though I still have not updated the beta), ~30-60 minutes long, a short horror game in PVGames style, no battles, just story and atmosphere.

6. Incitement 2 - 6-7 months of development, ~6-10 hours long, sci-fi in RTP style, mostly linear but with lots of sidequests.

7. Atonement - 8 months of development, ~10 hours long (~5 hours on each story campaign), PVGames style, each story is pretty much linear, but there are two story campaigns from POVs of two different teams.

8. Just Face It - development was sporadic and the game consists of 8 episodes (~10-15 minutes each). Each episode took about 2-4 days of development. Mostly RTP in style.

9. Harbingers of Woe - 1 month of development, ~2 hours long, challenging dungeon crawler with emphasis on difficult battles.

10. Incitement 3 - 5 months of development, ~7-10 hours long, same as the first two games in style except uses animated side-view battle system.

Hope this helps.

 

[Wavelength]

I've completed two games on the PC series (and another two, much smaller, games on RPG Maker 3).  Each one took about 250 hours to complete, and the games provide about 2-3 hours of very rich gameplay.

 

[mlogan]

I have technically completed at least 3 projects. One was a very short one, about 10 minutes, for a contest, completed in a weekend. The other two were 1-2 hours of game play and while technically completed, they were not great, lol. Both were for contests, one completed in about 3 weeks time, my first finished project and very shortly after getting Ace. The other was my IGMC entry, much improved than the other, but still not ideal.

 

[Dark Horseman]

Thanks for the info. I spent maybe 500 hours a few years back when ace came out but put down my project due to work and school, then time-consuming games. Wasn't sure I'd ever finish since I was guessing it'd take 2000 hours minus the hours I'd spend drawing custom resources. Then again, I supposed there was a chance I just sucked at game dev or was very inefficient. If 1000-3000 hours is what it normally takes to make a decent game (length of my WoW or LoL career), then it makes me feel a little better knowing that I'm on track versus allocating too much time on something I don't have much of a chance at.

 

[Kes]

I've fully completed 2 games and am probably around 85-90% completion for my third.  How long they are depends on whether you do all the side quests, optional dungeons. I know from feedback that player times vary a lot, so my times (obviously much quicker than anyone else's) 12-13 hours for the first, 15 hours for the second and I'm reckoning around 20 for the third.

That's in about 2.5 years.  Someone else (Indinera) does the final balancing and QA checks for me, so obviously that saves me time.  The current one is taking longer to do because I'm doing a lot more of the graphics myself, and structurally it's more complicated to do (split parties and such).  In addition the game world itself is bigger, with more towns and dungeons.

I actually have not kept track of how many hours I've put in.  It varies a lot and depends on many RL factors. I'm quite good at using small opportunities  e.g. if I get a seat when commuting, I can draft out ideas, dialogue sequences etc.  Obviously, though, over the time there must have been a great number of hours on this.

 

[Indinera]

I made 27 games (21 commercial, see my signature for details).   

Estimate lengths (in bold games that were not cooperations):

LF series - 200 hours

Millennium series - 60 hours

Asguaard - 50 hours

3 Stars of Destiny - 60 hours

Dreamscape - 20 hours

Sylia - 40 hours

The Book of Legends - 50 hours

Moonchild - 20 hours

Opaline - 15 hours

Onyx - 30 hours

Undefeated - 15 hours

Girlfriend Rescue - 8 hours

The Tale of a Common Man - 20 hours

Elendia Ceus - 20 hours

Most games take 3 to 6 months to finish, some around 1.5 month (Millennium, Moonchild), some around 1 year (LF).

 

[Bonkers]

I've completed 1 game, but am not a full time dev like many people on this site.  I'm currently engrossed in my second project which is nearing it's demo.

My total time spent in editor:  5406 hours with time spent in other applications to create resources is just as high.  

This is a hobby, but I play hard.

 

[Schlangan]

I'm working on one game only for now; I must have gone to hundredths of hours (didn't count from the beginning, should be easily 300-400 hours at least for now). Due to the size of the background story, the whole game would take, huh something like 50.000 hours, maybe more ? I don't really know

 

[Makio-Kuta]

I've been involved in the completion of 8 games. The shortest's ORIGINAL release was one evening (the fancier version was 2 days I think), the longest was 3 months. Most of the games were made with a two person team; the two mentoned here were both two person team games. Best record is a game with 10hours gameplay made in a month with a team of four.

 

[Indrah]

Made...a dozen games? I forget, too lazy to check. Around that maybe.

Most done in teams of 2 or 4, usually taking one month and almost always for contests. Game time is all over the place, from 1 to 6 hours depending.

And I'm cracking up at how hilariously skewed this poll is, since mostly only people who HAVE completed something are popping up at all. (We all know most people have a crapton of trouble and don't finish games, they just aren't voting XDD)

 

[Sharm]

I used to be in the "just enjoying the software" category but I decided to join IGMC this year.  While I still haven't started the game making yet, I've done enough planning and researching that I'm counting it as started.  I really hope this means I'll be in the "made one game" category in a couple of months!

I predict a trend towards either no finished games or multiple games completed.  People who have what it takes to make one game also have what it takes to do so efficiently and repeatedly.  The ones who get obsessive about their one game and polish it to perfection and can still finish something are going to be extremely rare.

 

[Makio-Kuta]

I used to be in the "just enjoying the software" category but I decided to join IGMC this year.  While I still haven't started the game making yet, I've done enough planning and researching that I'm counting it as started.  I really hope this means I'll be in the "made one game" category in a couple of months!

I'm gonna run the risk of being off topic just to say, YESS!! I am excited to see what you'll make!! Good luck!! I hope you'll move up to the 'made one game' category too.

 

[slimmmeiske2]

I uuh clicked the wrong option in the poll... woops. ^^;

My first project is still in progess, but I have released a first demo a few months back and have been working on the next. :3

 

[Archeia]

It depends on our mood...

8 hrs. 3 days. 2 weeks...a month. The longest I think I had to releasing a completing a game was around 3-6 months. One was released for Flash and one is a dungeon crawler.

I have one here that has been 6 months ish now but I haven't touched it for a bit and lost some materials due to PC issues.