Hello guys, I wanna ask
Heroes of Atlan: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lx.HeroesOfAtlan
Heroes Charge: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ucool.hero
Magic Rush: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moonton.magicrush
If this thread dont belong here (moderators) please move the thread to correct section.
This style of game needs lots of good artwork, animation and sound effects/music. The actual gameplay looks to be quite simple the complexity being in the balancing of the game mechanics and getting multi-player to work well.
The only real answer is to make one and find out or ask the developers, but lets see if we can break it down to a minimum viable product:
1 Map with 4 location types (gnarly woods, barren plains, spooky marshes, ice mountains)
Each location requires an arena.
Deck of 10 characters…
with 2 attacks and 1 defence animation (5 per side dark/light).
If you look on payscale you will see that the median graphic artists salary is about $15.61 per hour.
Lets assume it takes a good artist a day (8 hours) to do 1 item, you have to account for feedback/rework and communication time, that would be about $125 per day (hopefully this is an overestimation).
So our 10 (characters) * 3 (attacks + defence) = 30 + 1 + 4 = 35 days work
Now add in a week for UI features, buttons, menus, effects = 40 days work.
Total estimated cost of artwork $5,000.
If you want more characters and locations then it will take more time and effort.
The the game programming $29.22 per hour (payscale) or 8 hour day = $233.76
In Unity you can break the game down into scenes…
Main Menu - Options - Character Selection - 6 days
Map Scene - 3 days
Battle Arena - 20 days - (game balancing/networking)
Server Side Development - 14 days
So estimated 43 days programming at would cost $10,051.68
As you can see we are talking in the region of $20,000 (+sound/music) and we have not even factored in paying ourselves for the estimated 2-3 months work (always expect things to take longer and cost more than you expect.
The trick is to break it down and ask skilled people how much they charge and how long each item would take or you could just start making one yourself and time it.
PS if anyone with a better grasp of developing these types of games could provide more insightful input that would be great.
Another way to cost this would be to see if you can find all the assets you need on the asset store and cost them, anyone want to see if this is possible?
What if you buy BASE source code example from sellmyapp websites that they sell source codes and then hire developers to proceed with your features/requests/updates.
If you do that it will be hard to publish your game or should be good to go ?
Coz I heard some of the applications gets declined and imagine if someone spends BIG amount of money and gets declined its like throwing your money out of the window.
I could sell you or even gift you the source code for a simple RTS game…
https://arowx.itch.io/simple-rts
That will not give you a game up to the level of polish and features of a modern RTS style game, like Ashes of the Singularity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crPoyVGbNfQ
Or think of it this way these games occupy a niche and once people into these types of games have played them they will want something new and interesting not just another clone. You could have some success with a clone but you really need to make something new and a bit different to really make money.
Or if you can get the code for a type of game on sellmyapp then how many clones will the market have of that type of game? Once the market gets saturated with a type of game the potential value of that game goes down.
The parent company Tritonesoft appears to release thee or four games each year. I’m struggling to find details on the company, but based on their web presence, I’m picking somewhere between 10 and 50 employees. The company is in Korea, which has an average salary of $US 27,000 a year.
Do the math and that costs the game at somewhere between $US 70,000 and $US 300,000.
Its not a great estimate, but it should give you an idea on the order of magnitude. You can do the same calculation on your own for the other games on the list.
Probably double that because experienced software developers usually do much better than the average salary for a country. For example the average US salary is $44,000 USD, but any silicon valley developer would laugh and hang up the phone if given that low ball of an offer, since $100,000+ is pretty typical.
As far as what a game would cost a person to make on their own, it really depends on their skill set, the quality level they are going for, and the feature set they are going for. You can reduce your development time by half just by dropping multiplayer for example. You can use prebuilt models to drastically cut costs for your models, but they may be seen in other games or might not really reflect a unique style of your game.
Otherwise it just comes down to how many hours you need to pay other people to do work for you, times how much you will pay them per hour.
Just keep in mind - those examples are professionally built with all the appropriate bells, whistles and content.
To get a barebones demo up and running could be very quick and inexpensive, to go the whole way with like 100+ characters, all the content, etc, you’d be looking at a significant workload.
If you want to build similar experiences to those examples, I think you’d be looking at somewhere between a quarter million and a million depending on labor rates.
If you want to build a much smaller version that’s kind of similar, you can probably do it solo from asset store in 3-6 months if you’re a good programmer.
Note: it does not scale up linearly between the two.
Idk cost but I’ll give some insight on cost saving points
This uses zero animations and high resolution art for 100+ characters. I think it’s a trade off, compared to lower resolution art with animations. Could cut costs using lower resolution art and mimic the limited animated effects they use to represent animations. Lowering quality/resolution of sfx could also save in time/cost. It appears (might be wrong) they used a template to create that game, based on the results of other very similar games they also have created in the timeframe they released. Might have been a custom engine, but I don’t know. Pretty sure it’s not Unity since they are looking for C++ people.
Compared to
which has 40 moderate animated, lower resolution characters.
Compared to
Which has highly animated 3D characters and high visual fx.
Maybe in Korea - where they seem to be located, but for mvp I’d estimate artwork at about the same price but with different specifics, less on character animations - because I didn’t see any in the trailer, and more on visual FX.
Nice breakdown though. 
I would say, 100k USD at least, if know what you are doing.
This is kind of an open-ended question, because the cost depends really on how much you outsource…
If you outsource everything from programming, to art, to music, to whatever else… it will get pricey. If you are above-average at any of the above and can do it yourself, it will cost less. If you are with a team who shares the same vision and will take a pay cut or do it for their own portfolio, you shave costs.
A good option would also be too familiarize yourself with the code, and design… even if you do the design on paper. You want something that you can edit later and not break the game when it comes to balancing, etc.
If it was all outsourced, I would say yeah… 50k-70k easily for a polished and professional looking game.