Hey guys. Here's my issue... i have been working in the indie industrie for a couple of years, but its my first time to lead a team that develop games for mobile hardware. The thing is, we need to bring up at least 1 game per month, and i have only 1 team. Considering just the time for developing it and doing QA(1 month) (the gameplay its on me, and i take my time before i give green light), how many people do i realy need? And considering that we work on our free time, and the team has: 2 programers 2 designers 1 technical director 1 proyect director (and gameplay desginer) 1 sound guy ... how much time should we take to develop an average game? Thanks

Assuming your technical director is willing to roll his sleeves up and get down and dirty with the code (if he's not, fire him; there's no room for a middle manager in a sub-10 man team).

You'd be expecting 2.5-3 months development time per title, assuming you're only doing the main SKUs (so S40, S60, maybe 3-4 other pet-SKUs, depending on who's publishing this). If you're looking at the entire 50+ SKU time, your porting and testing goes straight through the roof.

To hit a 1 title/month, you'd basically be looking at 3 parallell groups, all sharing a base-tech set and pipeline. You'd be budgetting ~1 month up front (depending on how familiar you guys are with mobile dev) for basic technology pipeline, then move into an overlapped schedule where there should be one team at pre-prod (1-4 weeks), prod (5-8 weeks) and post-prod/testing (8-12 weeks) at any one time.

Each team would be 1 programmer + 1 artist. Share the producer + sound-guy between the teams.

What's your potential problems:
- Assume that your first game will pack everyone on, as you'll be learning (and Re-doing a LOT of stuff)
- You'll probably need another artist to spec out 3 teams
- Hopefully you have a retail channel for this already. Otherwise, expect to spend at least 1/3 of your team's time selling this to the horribly fragmented mobile-channels.
- Expect to rewrite your tech after you ship (or rather, QA for multi-SKU) the first title, and realize that Compile Once Run Anywhere is an evil and twisted joke at your expense.

You'll also find that this is a FULLTIME schedule, not a hobbyist one. If you're doing this at part-time, I'd assume that 1 title / 3 months for the entire team would be pushing it. You'd be surprised how much time final QA against multiple SKUs take.


Allan

If you are trying to develop games that compete with current commercial mobile games then 3 months to develop the game on 1 handset and 2 months to port to all the other hundreds of handsets. - that is what most mobile devs are working to at the moment.

Of course if you focus on smaller puzzle games you may be able to get them out quicker. Still not sure that 1 month to do everything is realistic.

Thanks for the advice guys. Realy. :D

Look, have you heard of the product Omega Basic? It is on www.thegamecreators.com if you go to the mobile phones section. This is easy Java development for the mobile platforms, and I could help with the programming and level workings there. You should get it, and probably have three programmers working on three projects at once, one that is new, one that is on its way, and one that is near finished. What do you think?

i'll check that out. thanks :D