How much time did you spend with your finished projects?
Exorph
eight weeks and I'd really like to get an idea of the possible scope
of the game. If we should aim at something like, say, Shade, or if we
might actually create a game as big as Anchorhead.
We'll have two programmers working on the code, and two graphic
designers that will both create some still images as well as help us
with item descriptions and all that. We'll be working at least 20
hours a week with the project, which means a total of 640 man hours.
Naturally, I'm not talking scope as in how many rooms and items we can
fit in, but simply how ambitious we can/should be.
So I thought that as a pointer it would be interesting to know how
much time you've spent on your works and how big they turned out.
Victor Gijsbers
Hash: SHA1
Exorph wrote:
> Naturally, I'm not talking scope as in how many rooms and items we can
> fit in, but simply how ambitious we can/should be.
I think "Fate", my second game, took me about 100 hours. Something of
that scope should be easily achievable by your team.
"The Baron" -- it's harder to say, because development time was spread
out over a far longer period, and included such tasks as translation. It
was certainly much longer than "Fate", and might be a bit ambitious for
your team.
Of course, a lot will depend on how experienced your programmers are,
whether you already have an idea for a game, whether any of you have
written IF before, whether you will be doing ambitious coding or
ambitious writing, and so on. :)
Regards,
Victor
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
iEYEARECAAYFAkq46lYACgkQoiOrMwvIZLzIHwCaA8p8aSbUK4NPohYbA1Ae16mA
8rcAniTrsy7JtQZ6vRlB9G5BGg8v350o
=QnsK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Jim Aikin
>
> So I thought that as a pointer it would be interesting to know how
> much time you've spent on your works and how big they turned out.
I just about wouldn't even want to try to estimate. At a guess, I think
it's possible that Eric and I each spent as much as 80 to 100 hours on
"Mrs. Pepper's Nasty Secret." I might have spent a bit more, because I
coordinated the testing, but he came up with some spiffy code to make
the cabinet doors fly open and shut, and I don't know how long he spent
on that. So make it between 150 and 200 hours total.
It's a small but fairly thorough game, with one chatty NPC, about 20
rooms, more than a dozen puzzles, and a hint system. No graphics, of course.
--JA
Andrew Plotkin
> As I said in another post, we'll be making IFs at school these next
> eight weeks and I'd really like to get an idea of the possible scope
> of the game. If we should aim at something like, say, Shade, or if we
> might actually create a game as big as Anchorhead.
>
> We'll have two programmers working on the code, and two graphic
> designers that will both create some still images as well as help us
> with item descriptions and all that. We'll be working at least 20
> hours a week with the project, which means a total of 640 man hours.
Shade took me a month. I was between jobs at that point, but probably
not putting in 20 hours a week. (I had other important projects on the
table. Like the original Golden Banana of Discord.) Call it 40 hours,
solo, followed by testing.
I program fast, mind you. Don't expect to make something 16 times
bigger than Shade. Four times as big would be plausible, *if* you are
familiar enough with the tools to jump straight in.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Emily Short
As well as I can estimate (which may be off):
Galatea: ~100 hours
Pytho's Mask: ~60-70 hours
Savoir-Faire: ~250 hours: more than full time for more than a month.
City of Secrets: 1000? Possibly more. Not counting the feelies. Worked
on it for years, including a much-more-than-full-time stretch at the
end.
Bronze: ~50-60 hours with a very disciplined design/coding cycle.
Alabaster: ~100 hours, not counting my collaborators' time or the time
that went into the underlying engine.
In my experience, the effort grows more-than-linearly with the length
and complexity of the game; in addition there are a lot of other
things that affect speed, such as your coding skill and familiarity
with your tools, how clearly you've thought through your design, and
whether you're able to work continuously and without interruption. (As
someone pointed out recently in another thread, when you start
programming for the day there's usually a startup period where you
have to remind yourself where you are and what you're doing next, so
the longer you can work at a stretch the more productive the time
you're putting in is likely to be, until you start getting tiredness
drop-off again.)
My guess is that something like Anchorhead might be overambitious for
a first project, not just because of the amount of time that's likely
to be involved in implementing it at all, but also because you're
likely to be learning a lot as you go about design and collaboration
practices. Adding collaborators means adding overhead for
communication and resolving any disagreements, which may also mean
that the total man hours don't work the way they would with a single
author.
S. John Ross
> So I thought that as a pointer it would be interesting to know how
> much time you've spent on your works and how big they turned out.
Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom was 400+ hours all told, including pre-
coding conception material, support material (docs, doodles), and
testing revisions, with the time spread out over several months and
concentrated into occasional week-long bursts (and a couple of full-
time weeks just prior to the first alpha test). _A great deal of this
was learning time;_ with a bit of rest, slightly better eating habits
and a copy of Not Just Lazing Around On Your Ass For Dummies I could
do it in half the time, now, I think.
K M
progress through your project(s) seem sigmoidal, with respect to the
amount of hours you spent on it? That is, the first several hours had
lots of false starts as you figured out the scope... then a fairly
brisk "middle eight" with rooms, actions, and objects pouring forth in
short order... followed by lots and lots of tedious hours tracking
down the Last Lousy Bug?
Maybe this is why I've gotten stuck in a WIP, motivationally --
because the time invested doesn't necessarily result in near-linear
results.
I'm a sucker for tiny incremental rewards. I like MMORPGs that show
XP progress to the hundredth fraction of a level, because I can
visually confirm that I am Making Progress. I hate that Disneyworld
phenomenon my brother calls the "switchback," where you wait patiently
in a long rollercoaster line and move forward to what looks like the
front of the line -- only to turn a corner, to find a line three times
as long as the part you just traversed (hidden from view where the
queue forms.)
Or, to recast Exorph's original post - if I have eight weeks to do a
project, maybe I should be "mostly done" at 3-4 weeks, not 7 weeks.
Jim Aikin
> These benchmark figures are useful. To those who've responded: did
> progress through your project(s) seem sigmoidal, with respect to the
> amount of hours you spent on it? That is, the first several hours had
> lots of false starts as you figured out the scope... then a fairly
> brisk "middle eight" with rooms, actions, and objects pouring forth in
> short order... followed by lots and lots of tedious hours tracking
> down the Last Lousy Bug?
My experience has been that the final part of the process is tedious
less because I'm tracking down bugs than because I'm processing lots and
lots of transcripts from testers. I always read the transcripts line by
line; I don't rely on the testers to flag the bugs explicitly, because
in my experience about 50% of the problems they find are problems that
they don't necessarily even notice! In reading a transcript carefully, I
spot all sorts of things that aren't good.
The first part of the process, the designing, is the most fun, but I
wouldn't call it "several hours," I'd call it "several days."
> Or, to recast Exorph's original post - if I have eight weeks to do a
> project, maybe I should be "mostly done" at 3-4 weeks, not 7 weeks.
"Done is a moving target. It's never "done." At some point you just stop.
--JA
Andrew Plotkin
> K M wrote:
> > These benchmark figures are useful. To those who've responded: did
> > progress through your project(s) seem sigmoidal, with respect to the
> > amount of hours you spent on it? That is, the first several hours had
> > lots of false starts as you figured out the scope... then a fairly
> > brisk "middle eight" with rooms, actions, and objects pouring forth in
> > short order... followed by lots and lots of tedious hours tracking
> > down the Last Lousy Bug?
>
> My experience has been that the final part of the process is tedious
> less because I'm tracking down bugs than because I'm processing lots and
> lots of transcripts from testers.
My progress is pretty linear; I get moving and then I pound away
steadily until it's done. I've had false starts, but they're of the
catastrophic "fling this into the garbage disposal, maybe pick up
pieces a few years later" kind.
The testing process involves a certain amount of tedium, but I've
never been very good at the "read all the transcripts and condense
them into TODO items" process. I still have Dreamhold transcripts
sitting in what is, very theoretically, my "to do" box.
> "Done is a moving target. It's never "done." At some point you just stop.
Agreed.
Exorph
helpful, it's definitely interesting, especially when it comes to the
works I've actually played. :)
The project seems to become quite ambitious after all judging from our
meeting yesterday. Luckily it's the kind of game where we could
theoretically cut out a huge segment of it and just move about the
story-bits wo compensate for it if we realize we'll never finish it.
Aim for the stars and all that.
Stephen Granade
> Here, Exorph <pde...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I said in another post, we'll be making IFs at school these next
>> eight weeks and I'd really like to get an idea of the possible scope
>> of the game. If we should aim at something like, say, Shade, or if we
>> might actually create a game as big as Anchorhead.
>>
>> We'll have two programmers working on the code, and two graphic
>> designers that will both create some still images as well as help us
>> with item descriptions and all that. We'll be working at least 20
>> hours a week with the project, which means a total of 640 man hours.
>
> Shade took me a month. I was between jobs at that point, but probably
> not putting in 20 hours a week. (I had other important projects on the
> table. Like the original Golden Banana of Discord.) Call it 40 hours,
> solo, followed by testing.
Arrival: Around 70 hours over four months
Common Ground: Around 80 hours over a year
Child's Play: Around 150 hours over a year (not counting the IntroComp
portion)
Losing Your Grip: Around 300 hours over a year and a half
The length of time on Arrival and Child's Play was inflated because I
was playing with new features and languages (HTML TADS for Arrival; I7
for Child's Play). Common Ground and Child's Play involved new gameplay
mechanisms that I had to create and debug, especially in the case of
Child's Play. Losing Your Grip was relatively straightforward, but was
very large, and as Emily said, it's a non-linear increase.
The 640-man-hour figure makes it sound like you could tackle an
Anchorhead-sized game, but I think that's misleading. I think your eight
week limit is what's really going to constrain what you can do. You've
got to design your game, and that design becomes a lot more tangly the
longer the game and a lot more daunting for new IF authors. You'll have
discussions back and forth about what the game should look like.
Based on that, I'd say stick far closer to the Shade end of the
continuum.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade
stephen...@granades.com