Hey Folks,
This is not another “how long will it take me to build my game” type of question.
I am just curious to how long did it take you to build your first game and what you did you do wrong on your game and/or what would you improve on your first game.
I have been build in my first game (simple 2d game) for about three weeks now and I still have a long way to go.
Six months to a very poor simple release :P… about 3 more months (a while later) to update and improve it…
So technically about 9 months for an asteroids clone 
6 Likes
3 months to make a simon says clone. Obviously took me that long because I didn’t have the editor’s dark skin at that moment.
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Hey MD_Reptile, How’s your Pixel Destruction going?
I could of released roughly 3 weeks after starting on development but Im not interested in releasing MVP low quality content.
Been working on it now for about 2 months (part time after full-time work) Plan to release in the fall.
The answers to this question hinge on quality and scope.
Also building a first game and releasing a first game are two different time scales. There is a lot more involved in publically releasing a game if you are hoping the game sells any copies, or gain any following for the game, development time will have to be spread out to allow for marketing efforts.
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I haven’t finished anything in 30 years.
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6 years and still working on it.
What I did wrong?
- Far to ambitious idea
- Poor planning
- Started over from scratch too many times, due to really poor planning
- No clear goal
- No clear concept of the storyline (It’s been mashed together as I’ve come along with the game- but I guess that could be added to the poor-planning argument)
- No clear gameplay concept apart from “You should kill evil monsters and collect stuff”
- No clear landmarks or goals regarding game updates/dev. progression, resulting in the game version currently beeing 2.25 even though the game is currently only in a state of “WIP”/Early Access/Beta release or whatever one would like to call it (Actually 4.225 but… yeah, let’s leave it at 2.25 for the public to see…)
- Did not do enough research for most things regarding the development (eg. software versioning schemes as mentioned above.) Resulting in large chunks of the game beeing completly rewritten and/or replaced by new methods. Again craptastic planning.
- Due to the overambitious game idea the development took so long time that I became better at creating 3d models and textures so that in order to maintain a somewhat regular visual content quality all in-game models and textures had to be re-done / updated
- Began marketing the game far too late
- Still spending far too little time marketing the game
- Did I mention that I lacked the better knowledge to do proper planning of the game?
Considering the “Kill evil monsters and collect stuff” though… personally, that’s enough for me to enjoy a game- but for some redicilous reason I decided that my game should contain NPC’s and they should talk and give the player missions, but this just added a really silly gameplay element of you clicking dialogue buttons without reading the text 'cause it’s mostly nonsense telling you to “go there, kill that, eat that, poop that, come back”. In order to get some sort of direction of where to head next to encounter more powerful monsters to kill, and collect more stuff!
… Despite the fact that I sound as if I hate my own game, I do enjoy both playing and developing it so I will continue to do so. It’s primarily for my own amusement I do it, and if someone test the game and enjoy it that’s a bonus.
But yeah… don’t forget to plan stuff…
8 Likes
It is still in the works, but theres plenty left to do before its ready to reach the kind of state Zoldens game is at (if you haven’t seen it, check this out) and get it more playable again (I say again because with the compute shader I haven’t got the character controllers and most other aspects running again yet, as I had to spend a lot of time learning how to write HLSL code).
Anyway - soon hopefully I will have news on Pixel Destruction to share in the thread in my sig!
Jelly In The Sky immediately reminds me of…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDw_mpjKlpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-9O1TOSfCM
And the one most folks these days are probably most familiar with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zguf7ZeBpA4
I think a person could probably make a new version of this game every 5 to 10 years for all of eternity and it would be fairly popular.
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Thanks for all the comments. The first time I use unity, I tried to build the MMO for about 3 months and I did learnt a lot but development took so long, and it didn’t turn out as expected so I made a goal to make very simple but fun game for start to end within 12 weeks. I believe the hardest thing in being a developer is scope. That’s my biggest trouble I start of small, then without me realizing the project become complex.
Animator2b, what is your project about? if I can ask
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I agree with you, there’s been so many clones of tanks
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Haha yes, jelly in the sky is a lot like those games @GarBenjamin - You should also check out @Zolden 's thread:
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A week for a minimally-graphical version of Hunt the Wampus back when I was learning programming. I’m no longer sure how long my first team project took, it was a very small RPG-style game with a whopping one quest done as a student team. No longer as students, our next game took two days learning XNA as we went.
It’s a story driven quick play puzzle game with kick butt animations and fx - for mobile.
Nothing super complex, but something I think is minimally innovative and will be fun to play for those who enjoy match3 games like Puzzle Quest. Will be announcing next weekend and the following week. 
3 Likes
About a month to make it to Level 2 in a hopeful mobile release of a Simple Apocalypse FPS. That’s learning from scratch, so the timing’s not too bad, but you need a clear idea of all the pieces you need to make your game work, and then some brainstorming on how to make those pieces modular.
This will be my first game, but I’ve been managing construction projects forever… and if you don’t want to get stuck on a project, USE THE KISS METHOD!
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid
Don’t get bogged down and spin your wheels forever, at some point you either jump or you don’t.
True. Too bad I had to learn that the hard way. Your game sounds pretty good, I will be looking forward to play it
Define “game.” I’ve got a 2D platformer with three levels that takes 15 minutes to play, that I built the basics for in a couple of weeks…but I consider it more of a demo.
As for an actual game…hold that thought for a few months (years? I hope not).
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Built my first flappy bird clone in a day.
Pond Wars took about three weeks for developing the core. About another six months experimenting with polish, platforms, marketing and so on before I was ‘finished’ with it.
My first complete real game took one day in GameMaker, it was a platformer game. I made it and released in within 24 hours just to do it, people liked it.
Honestly, things take longer when you don’t know the tools well. Know your tools, and it only takes a week to get a solid game engine running, if you’re really working hard on it.
If you know what you’re doing, on terms of structuring the code, you can be on to content creation almost right away. Solid gameplay can arise as soon as you have a win/loss condition, defined gameplay goals.
the longer part of gamedev (where most people never get to, sadly) is tailoring the games content to have a theme, a difficulty curve (ebb and flow, really though) and then a consistent feel and art look.
seeing so many people struggle with basic mechanics is disheartening, but it just goes to show that there is a lot of value in understanding the basics. 
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Don’t we all learn it the hard way. Kudos to you every time you push on through, right?!
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