Team size question - what do you think? how many ppl would you need?

Unity Engine
1

Hey all.

I’m not completely sure if this is the best place on the forum for this post, but it relates to many areas so no problem :slight_smile:

I’m now developing a 3rd person shooter demo and working with an art director colleague to get it done. I’m partnering with a BD manager and we’re aiming to get funding early next year. I’d like to hear people’s opinions on how big you think the team should be and how long you would use to develop this game to first release. Here’s the general overview:

  1. 3rd person shooter - future sci-fi theme.
  2. Online mulitplayer only (8 vs 8, death match, king of the hill, etc)
  3. PC only game (at first release). Not to the complexity of AAA games or Halo etc, think closer to Cross Fire or Counter Strike.
  4. Free to play, uses micro transaction to generate revenue (weapon upgrades, avatar customization etc).
  5. Similar size and complexity to that of Cross Fire (PC online game).
  6. Graphics will not be super, ultra, next gen.
  7. Aiming to include low end PC compatibility.
  8. Will include 5 maps at release. Not large, 4 vs 4 teams. (Same size as smaller maps in Halo).
  9. Will have a user sign up screen, quick training game, list of game room screens / match finding ability (no need to choose server, then zone, then lobby etc), ability to add friends, chat, VOIP, scoreboards and statistics tracking.
  10. 2 game modes at release - death match and king of the hill.
  11. Build using Unity and possibly Electroserver / Photon. Though could build our own server tech, please give me your opinion on how long for both. I’m tilting towards using an already built server package, not building our own.
  12. Item mall and ability to pay for in-game currency (paying for items).
  13. XP leveling system set up (going from Rookie to Sargent means you can access a new map, weapons, avatar customization etc).
  14. Will be published and operated by an already established publisher, we’re just doing development.

I know this is very vague as I don’t want to go on for pages and pages :wink: And obviously there’s a lot of smaller details that aren’t clear from my description here. Though my questions are:

  1. Does anyone know of a similar size / style of game and how long it took to build and what the team size was?
  2. How big do you think the team needs to be in order to have this game done in a year and a half (to first release)?
  3. Do you think a year and half is too much?
  4. How many artists, animators and programmers would you assign to this project?
  5. How many people would you have on the live team (doing updates, bug fixes, adjusting based on feedback etc)? - Programmers and artists.

There’s a bunch of points in there that I haven’t added, I know, please let me know if I can fill-in any blanks to make it a little clearer.

Great to get the community’s opinion on this, and thanks in advance to any replies :smile:
-M

2

I don’t have a good history of replying to threads like this, so I’ll avoid discussing things too deeply and just address a few of the simpler points. The one thing I will say is that with this many questions you may be biting off more than you can chew, but that is for you to decide. You’re clearly quite clued up and know what you want, though, and it’s great to see compared to kids wanting to make an MMO.

If you do this for a game such as the one you’re describing, you are unlikely to be able to have it operate as an authoritative server as you won’t have access to level geometry. You could potentially have an authoritative Unity client on the same server hardware or LAN as the Photon/whatever server, acting as a slave to provide any physics or collision. You’ll probably be forced into using Unity itself as the server, and for just 16 players it will be fine. You’re going to need a hell of a lot of headless Unity clients running, though, and a lot of servers.

Check out the thread I posted about this problem and feel free to contribute if you have any ideas.

You’re going to need to be very careful about these, perhaps even handling transactions outside of Unity itself and through a website plugged into your account database. There are a lot of security issues to consider here, the most important being somebody modifying the game client maliciously which is trivial to do. The more things like this you can do server-side, the better. Don’t include any of the transaction logic in the client. This would deserve a thread to itself to deal with all the potential problems you may run into.

Not sure how you intend this to work out, but if this is your intention then you should be approaching publishers ASAP with a 100% complete design document, business plan, and sales forecasts. In an ideal world, they would fund development for you. You don’t want to spend 6 months of effort and (potentially) a huge amount of money creating a “proof of concept” tech demo and then realise that no publisher is interested in it. Find out if they’d be interested first, because if not you’re going to have to publish it yourself.

What exactly do you mean by “published”, anyway? Are you planning on selling this in a retail box, or are you just talking about an online channel such as Steam? Ignore the above if so, as that’s not what I thought you meant by “publisher”.

“Blacklight: Tango Down”? I mentioned this game to somebody else with a similar idea recently, as it seems like a good example. It’s a budget game of the type you’re planning here, relatively ghetto graphics and gameplay, etc. I don’t know how many people were on the team, but they’re all very experienced in development and have been in the business for decades. They have 30 games behind them. Blacklight flopped and scored about 50% in reviews on average. No idea if it was profitable or not.

If you’re talking of a real indie shooter made by a team of less than 15 people without massive funding behind them that was commercially successful, then I can’t think of anything. It’s not an easy market to break into now that all the kids have got CoD and GoW to compare it to. The closest thing to this on the PC right now would be Team Fortress 2, which is almost exactly the same as what you’re describing.

Regarding your questions about team size in general, that’s something that you really need to be able to answer yourself, based on the asset and programming requirements in your design spec. I don’t think the people here can do anything but guess at this, because it’s you that’s designing this game and knowing how many people you’re going to need has to be a part of this. Don’t base your hiring on the guesses of people like me, whatever you do!

edit: It would be a good idea to hunt around and find out what other games are available like this as a first/next step. Not only will these serve as inspiration and help you estimate costs and dev times more accurately than any other method, but these games are established competition that you’ll have to rise above. Good luck!

3

Hi Xomg.

Apologies, apologies, apologies for the late reply. I usually receive a notification when someone replies to a thread but I didn’t see one for this thread. Thanks for the details, your insight is appreciated :slight_smile:

We’re now looking more in to the specific ramp plan details and I’m discussing this with our Technical Director and Art Director.

Again, thanks for the reply.
Best regards,
M