HOW LONG SHOULD IT TAKE FOR ONE TO FINISH A GAME?

It takes as long as it takes. For some it's a few months, for others it's 7+ years.

*waits for LockeZ to tell us how long he spent working on his V&V game*
:)

It depends on the scope of the game.

Does it have a long single player campaign? That will take WAY longer than most other types of games. PVP games are much quicker to develop, and procedurally generated games still take far less time than creating the same number of hours of content by hand.

Do you have a team? How many hours a week are you working on it? Are you using premade graphics and sound? Are you using premade scripts and gameplay systems that other people have developed libraries for?

I've got a pretty wide variety of timetables under my belt. So as to not disappoint Link_2112, let's go through them, and how I think they became as long/short as they were!



By the way, your English is almost flawless. It's good enough for the fact that you're apologizing for it to actually be annoying.

what?
short/medium length (30-50+ hours)

Bruh what? That's short-medium length for you? Holy crap.

The fact that it took you a little under a year to make it is pretty freakin impressive. Granted, I haven't played it, but the description tells me that what you've done was no small feat. You should be absolutely proud of what you've done!

There's way too many variables to make answering this easy, or even possible. 2014 was a fantastic year for me dev-wise in that I completed FOUR games that entire year. 2015 was much less so in that I only completed small projects that don't have a game page but are still here on RMN, like the Birthday game.

Soul Sunder is about 6-8 hours and took me a year and four months to bring from initial conception to completed product. Granted, a lot of that was learning the RPG Maker engine and writing dialogue, but it was pretty much the only thing I was working on that entire time.

I took a break to in the middle to team up with unity and Sooz to make Remnants of Isolation for the IGMC 2014, so that took a month and the game clocked in at a little under an hour. However the focus was more on the game itself and how to convey the tone and feeling without extensive dialogue, so the priorities were very different.

Prayer of the Faithless, my current project, has now clocked in a full year of time since its initial conception and only an hour long prologue is done. This is a different case from the other examples in that that year has been spent planning everything out. I penned the entire story, wrote out design docs, designed the battle system, and tested it all out with a prototype. So, unlike all my other projects, I've put together everything from the start, rather than just working on the game as I went along. As such, development of the game is taking longer, but the result is that it will be a much smoother experience.

So, in short, it's going to take as long as it needs to, and there is no real right answer to your question. However, I'd encourage you to try out those experimental games. Due to the very nature of it being experimental, some people may not like it. For you as a dev, though, it's a perfect chance to explore concepts and themes that may not be viable for a longer game project, and the ability to mark projects as complete will do wonders for your motivation.

Depends on your goals. 1 month for a prototype, 2 months for refining can be done.
13 months is usually a standard in 'professional' indie projects I worked with outside RM.

I get bored really fast, the longest game I made took 1 week and a half to make... Tried doing other stuff but I don't think I can work on the same thing for more than a month....

The time it should take to make something is, obviously, variable. There's no right answer.

He seems to think we made a Visions & Vindication crossover

...Maybe we should!?

Just a couple of notes concerning Indinera Falls:

1. Most of his games don't actually take as long as advertised. They're still huge, but those numbers are usually generous estimates.

2. The games I've played of his don't value the player's time. Good game design looks for ways to reduce the time it takes to play the game. For him he just doesn't bother, and may even purposefully elongate it (hard to say for certain). I think this is one reason there's so much divide over his games. Those that can accept the senseless padding find a lot of value. Those that can't, don't.

3. He uses a lot of tricks to improve his design speed, especially with mapping. If you look at his rough drafts of dungeons he just grabs the floor tile and draws a bunch of passages, filling in the rest after he has the layout done. He'll even start with a map size of how big he wants the dungeon to be and fill it in, rather than do what we all do and adjust the map size as necessary. He makes extensive use of symmetry for his "nice" buildings, like castles and what-not. Put another way, if he's actually trying to design a nice looking map, he'll just draw half of it and copies it to make it twice as big. He doesn't attempt some of the masterwork that you occasionally see around here. It's all about quick design.

4. He takes the MMO model in his game design. That means combining a bit of player confusion with a lot of dungeons and random battles. Designing plot, towns, cut-scenes -- these take a lot of time and are quickly run through by the player. But a simple increase in the random encounter rate can significantly increase the length of your game with zero extra work. So if you want a longer game, add in a ton of optional side dungeons and what-not. Mandatory battles are also big for him. Expect a lot of on-screen fights you can't avoid (but only face once).

5. Lots of characters and unimportant things to level up. If you want to get everything leveled properly you'll have to replay areas and grind. You also may not even know how you can get everything leveled up properly, which means wondering around the game world fighting battles while you look.

6. He has at least one play tester who plays the game while he's completing it and helps him manage difficulty and squash bugs. This is a HUGE help. Frankly, I'm not even sure if he plays through his own games. Does anyone know?

7. He doesn't waste time trying to find assets. For him, he looks for assets and then fits them into the game rather than the other way around (the exception being anything that he has someone make for him).

8. I almost forgot: he doesn't subscribe to the standard spell design of a lot of games. That means that you won't have a fire, ice, and bolt spell of approximately the same power. It means spells that inflict status effects may also deal damage. It means taking advantage of the default options for weapons and what-not to give a lot of weird bonuses that aren't intuitive for the player. All of this semi-randomness gives players something to think about and consider -- strategy, if you will -- without him actually needing to plan out any semblance of real strategy in the game.


I figured that he takes about two hours of work to design one hour of content, if the advertised numbers are accurate. I tried that once and it would be generous to say the results were satisfying. Yes, I had one hour of game play with only two hours of work. And it didn't look half bad (if you're curious, the entire first dungeon and town of my game Crystals is part of that effort). But the balance was a complete mess since I didn't have time to play test it, and I didn't really have a chance to do any of the more fun coding that I wanted to do. Moreover, it really required focus to work on it. I never sat back and wondered what I was doing. I never questioned if the first dungeon should be three floors or two floors or considered where houses should go in town. I just made the stuff and called it good.

I estimate Indinera Falls takes at least 4 hours per hour of actual in game content. He's also really experienced with it, and so it's easier for him not to think about town layouts, for example. And it might not be that terrible of a method either. If you're just stamping down content to connect your plot points, give side quests, or shop/inn access, you probably don't need to spend that much time in the design. If instead you're creating a more clever, dense, game experience you won't be able to get away with what he was doing. But that's not what he does. His goal is content, and he does that very well.

So to go back to your game design: if you're trying to crank out plot and you're really concerned about time, you may consider skimping a bit more on mapping and gameplay so that you can more quickly get to each plot point. If you do this, be sure to include a lot of stuff for the player, though. If you're not going to purposefully design stuff to be fun for the player, you need enough stuff in there so that they can have fun by themselves.

author=Craze
also yeah re: indinera, he is a fucking hack and should be 100% ignored. of all the people i dislike in the greater RM* community, he might be #1. anything from aveyond or aldorlea can be ignored as utter shite.

lol Craze. xD

I personally haven't given his games a shot because the fanservicy crap he has in his title screens kind of put me off a little.