How long does it take to produce games?

Well, this is not an easy question.

If your team is not experienced, you will fall in many pitfall so you need to consider adding a lot of contingent time.

If you check my games: http://www.ovogame.com
I made Smileys in 2 weeks, but Anka took me 15 months (full time).

I'm currently working on a brand new IOS game (casual action game like Angry bird, cut the rope...) I'm planning 2 to a max of 3 month of works. I'm on my own for designing, producing, coding testing and I hire freelance artist for the art. Now, I have decade of experience in game dev, so this might be different if you are innexperienced.

Game creation take time, a lot of time. Having a prototype running is just the beginning of the road.

JC

 

I agree with Ovogame, each game needs it's own time, a prototype running it's only the beginning. And there's other important thing to add to the timeline, "client now wants X feature" or simply "I don't like this, let's change that".
So a game from start to end maybe could be made in 2 weeks or 1 month, but as soon as you start changing things the time needed would be multiplied by 2

 

Thanks. Yes, I have 2 Mac games already but I haven't made them Mac Store compatible yet. I'll do it later when I finally get some free time but I won't be ready on launch day.

 

If I remember correctly, it was built off of an existing engine.

Also, I believe it was built in 3 phases with downtime in between. Don't underestimate the value of "downtime" in building a game.

For me at least, the time when I am not coding / creating art / etc... is often the time when I come up with the best ideas and think of ways to solve difficult bugs.

 

Ramps is our first iOS game, so we had some turbulence, but for the most part it went pretty smooth. It took us 5 months and about 850 hours.

What I found interesting was that the amount of time invested was split almost evenly between art and visual asset creation and programming. I'm sure this ratio varies by game, though.

 

Here is a link: http://www.gamingdaily.co.uk/2009/adam-atomic-on-canabalt/

And a quote:

Another thing you should think about when calculating the schedule time for your game is updates. When talking to developers I doubt many of them added the time it took to develop updates. My first game, Tatomic, took about 6 months of development time, but the version that is live right now includes at least 2 additional months for the various updates I released.

 

Hey there, unfortunately you're looking for the magic formula of "If I do X then Y WILL happen". In games dev (or any creative industry for that matter) estimates are exactly what they are. The formula is more "If I do x then Y SHOULD happen". ;-)

Without knowing what your idea is roughly about it would be hard for anyone to give you solid advice about it. Is it 2D or 3D? Are you starting from scratch? I think a guy on your A-team thread mentioned experience of your team members.

Having started up my own company last year, I can't tell you how slow things move. Especially as I have had to keep my normal job too.

You're going to make mistakes along the way but dust yourself off and keep going. Forums like these are helpful and there are some other indies that are more than happy to have a kind chat over email / msn / phone or whatever.

Good luck!

 

Answer: Longer than I think it will take.

Big Mountain Snowboarding was supposed to take 2 months. Took 6 till the first release and more months on updates.

OverPowered was supposed to take 4 months. It's looking like it is going to be a whole year by the time we get it out.

We're making two little games: Scribble Worm and Bubble Battle. Each was supposed to take about a week or two. We started them about a month ago and we're almost at the working prototype phase.

Maybe I'm just really bad at estimating or project management. This is with an engine we're very familiar with and a lot of big game experience. Make an educated guess about how long it will take and multiply it by 4.

 

Our game took us 3 months part-time for a team of 4 developers. The rough breakdown of hours:

• Programming - ~200 hours
• Design - ~100 hours
• Art - ~300 hours
• Sound - ~30 hours
• Marketing/Press/Business - ~100 hours

I've been to a few talks by the Fruit Ninja guys (Halfbrick) and they said it took about 6 weeks to create Fruit Ninja, 2 weeks of which they spend fine tuning the "cutting" mechanic.

 

I'm planning to go about it by making small games with short dev times until I can use the money from those to fund larger games.

If you make 1 game in 12 months, and despite being an epic creation you're proud of it doesn't happen to sell well for some reason, you're out a year of development time and money.

If I make a game every 2 weeks, even if those games aren't epic, that's 24 games in a year. Odds are out of 24 games, 2 - 5 of them are going to hit decently. One might even be a huge hit. I can also re-market those 24 games over time, play with their prices, package them together, make some of them sequels to create recognizable brands, do cross-promotions, etc.

And if one of them doesn't sell, it's no biggie, I'm only out funds for 2 weeks worth of development. And if no game out of 24 sells good, that's a sign that I should be looking at a career in something other than game development haha

Also if you have one game in the App Store selling a measly 10 copies a day, that sucks. That's like $3,650/year. But if you have like 20 games in the App Store selling 10 copies a day, that's $73,000/year. Obviously you factor in sales fluxuations but logically the math favors a short dev-cycle system.

Then in Year2 I can use the money from those tiny games to fund an epic game. It's just hard to have that kind of patience...we all want to make our magnum opus as our first game.

- Quickdraw