First post, and been researching this topic for some time now, and figured I mind as well ask the community!
I am in the process of developing a game on paper. The game is a very small isometric dungeon crawler. When I say small, maybe ten levels, and RPG attributes mixed in, offline. Think Diablo but without online.
Currently I have a figure in my head as the following: 2 Full-Time Programmers , 2 Full-Time 3D/2D Artist.
But I am unsure on this number. On paper I would want the game to be fully done in a years time, with mile stones reached every 3 months. But this may be too ambitious.
Any insight into the amount of developers needed and length of time for development would be appreciated as I move forward.
Conservative estimations only, thank you.
Edit More Details On Features:
3 Character Types
10 Skills each (all the same)
10-15 Monster Types
5-10 Monster Skills
5 Environments
We had 60 people working in one office on Diablo 3, and that was just for the game-specific stuff (art/animation/systems/producers/writers/core programmers/battlenet people) there were two other entire buildings dedicated to other things like cinematics and marketing.
Youâve listed two programmers, but what are they going to be doing? Programming covers a lot of bases and almost all of those bases (save online) are required for a game like Diablo. Youâll need systems designers, world designers, ui/ux designers, QA testing (a lot of it).
As for the artists, unless youâre planning on contracting out 2/3 of your projectâs assets that isnât going to do it. Is the 3D artist also going to be rigging/animating?
How much are you looking to spend? Obviously it has to be quite a bit if your looking to pay someone a full-time salary (trust me that adds up very quickly). Itâs hard to give conservative estimates on anything without knowing where youâve set the bar.
Iâve seen Diablo 1 clones made by just a few people. To build something like that when Unity is doing all of the engine work is not difficult. A good generalist programmer and a good generalist artist could probably knock it out in six months to a year.
I am working with a friend who has no video game programming experience or art skills. I am the programmer and he creates story/game play mechanics and I program them. I have been working for about 4 months now and have completely
restarted sometimes because I learned faster an more efficient programming skills and structure. With the information you have given and what I know with my experiences so far, you might be able to finish in a year if you have competent programmers and work around the clock.
ONE person can make a cheap/weak diablo knockoff using low-poly graphics very quickly, in few months time, using low-poly graphics.
However, if you need quality, youâll waste months of it. If you want âphotorealismâ (In diablo-clone), then youâll also waste a lot of time on it. If you need quality animation, music, sounds, etc, etc⌠you get the picture.
Also, donât forget that youâre going to need sound and animation clips too.
I donât know what kind of game youâr trying to make, and how skilled the people youâre working with are. If people are competent and youâre working full-time on it, one year is plausible. You wonât need to write the engine.
I suspect that you might be underestimating animation/sound aspect of the game, though.
@OP - absolutely no, you donât have a big enough team and your time frame is unrealistic if you intend for this to be of commercial quality.
At our peak we had a team of 10; double that would have been more appropriate for our needs. Nice to see someone who worked on Diablo 3 giving you an idea. Focus on these words: massive undertaking. RPG is by far the broadest genre to make.
5 environments doesnât sound like much at all. Is this more of a hobby project?
Functional roles the OP does not list:
Project Management
Art Direction (for visual consistency)
Concept Artist (not the same as a 3d artist)
Animation (not the same as a 3d artist)
Level Design (not the same as a 3d artist)
Script Writing (story, character one-liners)
Sound Design (not the same as a soundtrack composer)
Soundtrack composition (not the same as a sound designer)
Dialogue Recording
Community Management
UI
Localization
QA
None development functions: accounting, marketing and legal.
Some quick facts:
Our illustrator designed and hand-painted 850 unique inventory items, special abilities and character portraits over 3 years. Productivity varies from 1-2 icons per day depending on what it is, working at 512x512 rough painting which is then scaled down to the actual icon size for crisper results;
We only have 3D item representation of weapons and shields; for a dedicated ARPG you need to model, UV and paint all of your items including armor so they show on your PCs. Thatâs a huge undertaking. We had a dedicated artist working on just weapons and shields for 2 years. Add in armor and youâll need 2 artists as a minimum;
An experienced character artist takes 2 weeks to model, retopo, UV and hand-paint a diffuse-only character not including LODs. If you want next-gen, thatâs 4 weeks per character minimum; probably more if itâs PBR and will feature in cut scenes or marketing assets;
Youâll need both male and female variants of your hero classes;
If your game has voice acting finding talent, recording them and editing the audio takes an age;
Artists are rarely strong in multiple disciplines, specialists are best;
The best concept art can come from unexpected team members;
For an RPG, you should spend at least 6-12 months in pre-production;
Hope this helps. Remember, RPG = massive undertaking.
What quality do you target, a game with average gameplay, graphics.Or a top quality game , very polished with lot of character research and story/background research , and lot of level design research, lot of animations and effects polishing , this will need skilled people.
old school graphics ? Diablo 3 quality ? Lost Ark ?
l would not bet in number of people but how skilled are the people working in the project and how fast they can work and how much time they work on the game.
What is your role on the game ? do you code or do 3D art ?
The barbarian was a one man (+freelancer) project.
This is ios arpg, I know he plans a steam release soon.
In terms of quality, you obviously canât reach a Diablo 3 with a small team, but I think you can come closer than most here believe.
If you look at Diablo 3 in detail, youâll note that they absolutely lavished attention on the impact animations and impact responses. Although D3 made some missteps with the Auction House, the âfeelâ of the game was universally praised. I think that the secret sauce to the âfeelâ of the game really revolved around the attack impacts and enemy responses. The player movement was fast (animations rarely played at normal speed), but the enemy impacts are, imo, the most impressive aspect of D3.
For diablo 1 style game it is enough i think, however i donât know how long those graphics would take. You should not underestimate the amount of graphics that diablo has on maps, they are generated to some extent but there are also many graphics in locations.
got cash? Buy a starter kit like Okashi Framework and then a bunch of assets that match stylistically and you can pretty much put out one a month if you work hard.
Was not expecting this kind of response! Was not even expecting anyone to reply. And I will try and reply to each person as best as I can.
The gist that I see is I will not be able to achieve AAA graphics/sound which such a small team. That I concur. Let me stress this: I am not looking to achieve godly graphics and animation. The world will be dark anyway to hide the flaws ;).
I am also not looking to have any cutscenes. I would much rather do something cheaper, and/or comic book type cutscenes. I am also also not looking for amazing sound. Just enough.
I want to reuse as much as the graphics I can possible use. This includes reusing graphics and relabeling them in the world. Dungeons will reuse monster animations with different names highlighted to show strength, so on, and so on.
My initial thought was to have as small as team as I can to get some prototypes working. Having a fully complete game based on a single level with all working mechanics figured out. Then outsourcing the rest of the graphics to expand the zones in the game.
McMayhem, thank you for the insights. Its mind blowing. The two programmers I listed will be a type of jack of all trades, master at none. I am not looking to do any type of Online stuff. Single Player Offline.
My bar is not as high as your use to working with! That I can tell you. I would love to have a big team like that, but realistically I would not be able to afford one. I can afford a 2-3 years development cycle with 4 people full time.
BoredMormon, thank you for the insights. Do you think 1 g-programmer and 1 g-artist to kickstart this prototype is enough to see where its going and then adding in more help for programming, art? Paying people is also super important so they can survive while doing what they love. Although, for a startup its hard to even consider such an adventure, you can literally waste 2-3 years of someones life and then be like, âHey sorry, didnt work out, go find another jobâŚâ Hopefully people know what they are getting into before they jump on the train.
zenGarden, spot on. Quality, quality, quality. Average Quality. Old School Graphics, I want to build the entire levels in a 3D environment and then export them in 2D, slice em up and use those for an isometric tile based game. Characters/Monsters would be the same.
My role is wearing as many hats as the team does and then some. I will be overlooking day to day progress, giving my thoughts on their work and where we should be aiming to be with such and such mechanics (and how they should work/be set up). I have a background of 5+ years, C/Assembly and fiddling around with OGL/DX.
If I could get away with 2 person team to start with I would go that way and then add more people where I see needs the most work. What do you think?
frosted, thank you. You given some hope in my goals. That video was really great!
AdvancedGir, yes you and frosted seem to give the same type of feedback. This is possible.
@Everyone. Thank you for the replies and insights. With everything being said, it seems like having a 4 person team can be doable.
I think Ill start off slow, only having 2 people to start. And adding in other help as the need arises. Unless this thing can only be doable with xx people working full time.
I wrote a lot this morning, and now I need more coffee.
I thought we were talking about a diablo clone and not a great game.
For a great game, I agree, but a random dungeon with a simple village? Easy peasy - if you donât have to create any art or write any code. Oh, and have plenty experience with Unity.
You can aim a lot higher than you describe. If your team is skilled, then you can reach closer to full AA quality like PoE.
With that man hour count and a skilled team you can really accomplish a lot. Reality is, most teams will not be adequately skilled to make that happen, so choose your team wisely.
If youâre inexperienced at game development, I would caution against this as an initial project, since you may not be able to really determine the skill levels of your potential team mates. With your level of funding, you could really put something solid out. Or you could burn through hundreds of thousands of dollars and come up with a flop.
Unless you have some kind of relationship with at least one veteran game developer - you may want to put off a project of this scale.
I want to note that any form of an RPG is probably not a good starting game. I would start out a bit smaller. In my case the RPG I am working on is massive and I am the only programmer and this is the first game I have actually tried to commercially make. I have spent about 3 months just planning everything. I think it should also be said that creating a AAA quality game (if thats what you are going for) is possible for a small team but will take forever. I donât know for sure but most of the million dollar budgets of AAA game are used for marketing and paying the 100âs of people working on the game. If you could somehow convince people to help create your game for free until you get steady cash flow to pay them then that would be Ideal. I would make a few smaller games and use the Income of those to hire people to make a much bigger game such as an RPG.
So this is a commercial venture with you risking your own money? Whatâs your total budget for those 8-12 man years, and which platform(s) and pricing model are you targeting (one off, or f2p with IAP)?
I ask because if youâre in China the development costs are lower than if you are in say the USA. This affects the business case for the project. Are the team young, living with parents and willing to live on the breadline, or do they have families to support and mortgages to pay?
Please tread carefully and consider the business case. I fear you might be about to burn a wad of cash on a very uncertain future where you have little to no visibility of the outcome. Whatâs the impact on you personally if you make 0 sales and lose all your investment? If you do go ahead, consider building in gateway reviews every 6 months where you critically assess progress. Be prepared to pull the plug and cut your losses.
