What would a Unity game cost?

Questions & Answers
1

Hello everyone,

What are we doing?

We are students working on a project with Unity. Our idea is to make a locally-hosted multiplayer game in which users can make a choose a dinosaur and edit it’s capabilities like it’s teeth, it’s skin, it’s claws or tail etc. The user can then put this dinosaur in a virtual world in which it must survive for a round. The better the dinosaur survives the higher the score of the player. Naturally the player controls the dinosaur so it’s not only the dinosaur that counts but also how the players uses it.

Our game in short:

The user can for example pick another kind of tail to give the dinosaur more agility in exchange for strenght. Or the user can choose boneplates on a dino for extra defense in exchange for speed etc.

The game itself is a rpg/adventure game. Once the user has created the dinosaur, it can be set in a virtual 3D world and must survive against other dinosaurs from other users. Some dinosaurs are plant-eaters and eat only plants and must defend themselves against predators, while meat-eaters (predators) must try to kill other dino’s.

The score of the player is determented to how much food the player can gather in the game. But the game also works in rounds. Every round takes up to like 5 min in which a winner is selected by score, the virtual world changes to a new world/level and a new round starts.

What we have achieved so far:

We created the interface and made the dinosaur walk around in the game world. But all the rest is still too difficult for us.

Finally our question:

After hearing all this, we are not asking for help on how to make it,
We are asking how much time do you think it would take one or more experts to create such a game? (for example even by a professional small game studio), and what would such a project cost? How much would a professional unity developer cost per hour?

Thanks in advance for your opinion!

p.s. in euro’s please:)

2

So, as you say yes Unity is precisely one thing you would do such a job with.

Well let’s say your studio is doing it for a client.

To hire 3D artists and animators to make the world and the dino-parts you’d pay Euro10,000 - 50,000

(ie, it is “one to many months work”. 3D talent ranges from “pretty expensive” to “very expensive”)

To program up the “dynamic” parts would be Euro30,000 - 100,000. (ie three to many moths work)

To program up “just the normal game” – the same again.

Your own time and your assistants etc … allow 3 to 12 man-months.

Incidental stuff (an iPad icon is $1000 to $15,000, sound design is a few thousand to more, etc etc etc etc) so allow at lest 10-20 thousand for endless incidentals.

So you can see that your quote, to a client, would be very roughly 50,000 (“home made looking”) to 200,000 (if you were doing it for say a soft drink company for a promotion).

You’re in France? As you know, by far the biggest money making video game in the world for some two years now (Skylanders) is a French company. You could telephone them, say you are a student, and ask to speak to a producer. Say you would like to know how many full-time staff work on it. (My guess at Activision, say 50 people?) Your game is basically “one scene from” Skylanders, plus the Dynamic stuff. (Please let us know here if you have the answer!)

Alternately just on your iPad go to any popular game and look at the credits screen, “Monsters Condo” has a lovely credits page, and they give away exactly how many full-time staff they have, and it takes 1/2 to 1 year to make such a game.

Hope it helps!