How long's did it take to write your game?
Edmund Kirwan
Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
.ed
Jim Fisher
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
Months. Um, but I'm not actually finished yet. Better make make that years.
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Fredrik Ramsberg
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
Roughly 14 years. Since I had two co-authors, I think it would take
about 42 years to write a game on my own. Give or take some.
/Fredrik
Paul Johnson
still tweaking the code! My last game "The Ghost Train" about three months.
Paul T. Johnson
Quintin Stone
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
My current WIP was started in September. It's nearly done.
/====================================================================\
|| Quintin Stone O- > "You speak of necessary evil? One ||
|| Code Monkey < of those necessities is that if ||
|| Rebel Programmers Society > innocents must suffer, the guilty must ||
|| st...@rps.net < suffer more." -- Mackenzie Calhoun ||
|| http://www.rps.net/ > "Once Burned" by Peter David ||
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Michael Coyne
> Roughly 14 years. Since I had two co-authors, I think it would take
> about 42 years to write a game on my own. Give or take some.
Having worked with co-authors before (but not on IF), my experience is
that each additional author doubles the time and work, rather than the
opposite.
It's a little like software projects in that way.
Michael
Michael Coyne
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
I started learning Inform in February, and started writing my first IF
piece in March.
I'm nearing completion now, but there still seems to be a mountain of work
to do. I'm wasting time fiddling with existing things now rather than
finishing up the last few locations. I hate me.
Michael
J. Robinson Wheeler
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
>
First Things First: 4 Years
Four in One: 3 Months
Being Andrew Plotkin: 3 Weeks
Centipede: 10 Days
The Tale of the Kissing Bandit: 5 Days
ASCII and the Argonauts: 15 Hours
A Scurvy Gift for Bos'n Chuck: 2 Hours
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davidw
months and most of my others have varied between the two. It depends
to some degree on which authoring system you're using. If you use a
system like Adrift - like I do - you can write games pretty damn quick
because you don't have to spend a month poring over code before you
start writing. The same game with Tads would probably take twice as
long.
Gunther Schmidl
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
Oh God, please don't ask.
-- Gunther
Seebs
Edmund Kirwan <ade...@eircom.net> wrote:
>Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
>Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
Janitor was "months" - maybe a year, but there were a couple of one to three
month breaks in the middle. The current WIP is looking more like a solid
year, and I've got less time to work on it, but it's also much bigger.
-s
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http://www.seebs.net/log/ - YA blog. http://www.seebs.net/ - homepage.
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ji...@le-kaki.com
So it's like 350 hours, 1 hour per Ko of the game ;-)
Not counting reading the DM4, testing and browsing on raif, but counting
learning the language by exercising on the game.
JB
Edmund Kirwan a écrit :
D. R. Porterfield
>
> I'm nearing completion now, but there still seems to be a mountain of work
> to do.
Someone somewhere once said that the first 90% of a work of IF takes
90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. I
have discovered that this is true. Sometimes it feels like a Xeno's
Arrow situation -- you keep covering half the remaining distance, but
you never quite seem to get there. I've been working on my first game
for over a year, but that's partly because it was, in retrospect, a
rather ambitious project for a first-time game. I've actually spent a
fair amount of time making it smaller than it was originally planned
to be, whittling the map down to more playable proportions.
> I'm wasting time fiddling with existing things now rather than
> finishing up the last few locations. I hate me.
Actually, I don't think this is a waste of time at all, and not just
because I've also been doing a lot of it myself (fiddling with
existing game objects instead of finishing up the map). If I'm
inspired to work on a particular object and make it more interesting
or powerful or whatever, I go ahead and do that while I'm into it,
even if it wasn't what I'd planned to do when I first sat down to
code. That way, it gets done, and I have fun doing it. If I force
myself to do some other coding task (say, writing room descriptions)
when I'm really more interested at the moment in fiddling with the
code for (e.g.) a magic baseball, the descriptions will probably end
up having to be rewritten anyway because my mind is halfway on
something else, and the magic baseball code may not get written at all
because the inspiration has passed. Other days I might be more
interested in writing descriptions than in coding objects. So I tend
to work on whatever aspect of the game I'm most motivated to work on
at the time. Since I'm not getting paid anything for all the effort, I
figure I might as well enjoy myself while I'm doing it, and eventually
it will all get done.
-- David
Michael Coyne
> Actually, I don't think this is a waste of time at all, and not just
Thanks for the encouragement : )
> code for (e.g.) a magic baseball, the descriptions will probably end
What? Another magic baseball in a game?
<scratch> <scratch> <scratch>
Now I have to rework that whole glowing diamond and burnt club puzzle.
Michael
Steven Feil
> Authos, how long did it take you to write your last game?
>
> Are we talking weeks, months, or years?
According to Harry Hol it takes two years. See
http://www.xyzzynews.com/dutchdapper12102002.html for details.
PS. If Your reading this Harry, you need to stop and get back to working on
Reality's End. :-) :-)
--
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Steven Feil | It may be true that necessity is the .~.
Programmer/Developer | mother of invention, but I say that more /V\
sf...@io.com | often than not, it's one ugly mother. // \\
| --- Steven Feil (X_X)
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