I just wanted to find out the difficulty of a project I want to do. This is just a very very brief and vague description of the project but i wanted to get a general idea. Please bear with me as I am not a programer. Any way, I go to Temple University for business and i came up with a great game for a business project and shared it with some other business majors from temple and other colleges and has had a huge response. Any way, the best way i can explain it quickly is its a board game but on the computer. It would be like a program that the user would download and it would all be connected on a network. It would basically be monopoly but online. (the game is nothing like monopoly but thats the kind of "game" it is) It would have alot more options including a interactive stock market. It would also need to have many other features but thats just a general idea. So I am looking for how easy or hard this kind of game would be to make. Plus any suggestions of what kind of programmer I would need and anyone else I might need. Also the costs of having someone design and if i need server harderware the cost of that also. Or if anyone is interested in the full game details contact me. AIM: hotchocolate1488 Email: clandis@temple.edu THANKS

The doesn't belong in this forum, but I'll bite.

The project you vaguely described would probably take anywhere between 1 to 10 work years to complete professionally. The low end is if they already have an engine that is similar to your needs; otherwise, it would be closer to 6-8 work years.

A professional development team, with around 3 engineers, 3 artists, 1-2 QA, and associated support costs (from business owners to the person who takes out the trash) could probably have it done in around six months, but much less if they had an existing framework. Continued maintenance for your server would be an ongoing cost.

So, if you had an experienced professional team who are just adapting their nearly-identical existing technology, and doing it in under 6 weeks , you'd be looking around $100K to $150K, depending on where in the country you look. You could go down to $50K or a little less if you went to another country. That would be a very rough job and would require them to have a similar game already out.

If you were looking for something from scratch or from a dissimilar engine, again with an experienced professional team making a polished game, you'd be rapidly approaching $750K to $1M.

If you don't care about quality, QA, and are willing to take huge risks that it will never be done, you could hire some teenage kids and pray that they'll actually finish with something that is useful.

The human costs to make software are very expensive. Most profitable software products needs to sell many hundred thousands copies in order to break even. Moderately complex software costs several few million dollars to research, design, produce, test, and ship.

Good news and bad news.

The good news - depending on the level of simplicity you can live with, it might be able to make this game for under $50,000. (A lot less than what "frob" said.) Maybe.

The bad news - you shouldn't try to manage the development of the game yourself. You probably need to hire a producer too - which adds considerably to the cost. See the talk I gave at Serious Games Summit last year - I think it's on the Serious Games website.
http://seriousgamessource.com/features/feature_111706_sgsdc_1.php
https://www.cmpevents.com/GDsg06/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=92158

Other than the interactive stock market, what exactly excludes this from being a board game? Could you prototype this on your own (I would imagine you could even prototype the stock market part although it might be less flashy than you'd like)?

If you can put together a board game prototype it would make everything much easier, as not only does the development team have a more mature rule and feature set for the game, but you could have already done a lot of iteration on what you like and don't like about the game without incurring the cost of the dev team. Plus it has the added benefit of being able to throw away your idea without having committed a considerable amount of money if you either lose interest or realise that it's not as good as you originally had thought.

You are going to be put off by the budgets needed to produce PC games nowadays. It's the level of graphics and gameplay depth that is expected in order to be competitive with similar offerings on the market that calls for such budgets, not that the PC is a more difficult platform to target. As Tom suggested, you can do something that works with a very low budget. The problem is going to be the added costs in marketing & promotion needed to make your game stand above the crowd high enough and long enough to get revenues.

The cellphone gaming market is a lot more open to board-like casual gaming than the PC / Console one. As a reference, simple Java games on cellphones (i.e. Sodoku et al.) have an average production budget of US$50K, take 3 months to produce (1 month for design & generic implementation, 2 months of porting to various handsets), and have a team of 2 programmers, 1 artist and a part-time producer. More elaborate Java games (i.e. racing, action) tend to cost around US$75K and take 4 - 6 months. Granted the difficult part is deployment but there are quite a few aggregators out there to help you out.

Hope this helps.

-cb

Any way that it works out, all of us have suggested around $6000 per person-month of work.

The amount of complexity (again, the OP was very vague) is the biggest determining factor. The key points that I was focusing on were: PC game, multiplayer networked, complex in-game marketplace, server-based persistent markets, unspecified "many other features".

cbenoi1 mentioned professional quality Sudoko in three months and $50K. That's a fairly simple game with trivial rules. Similarly, a racing game can be done quickly in a static world with relatively simple, well known constraints and using well-understood game rules.

If the OP's game is going to fall along those same lines of simple well-known rules, then I agree it would take those lesser prices. But if it is going to be a networked, persistent marketplace world requiring a significant amount of design tuning late in production and long-term maintenance, the game won't be inexpensive.

> Any way that it works out, all of us have suggested
> around $6000 per person-month of work.

Yep, that's about right for internal costing purposes. If the OP decides to go outside and contract the project out, the quoted price range is about US$10K to US$12K per man-month. I was recently quoted US$15K per man-month from a tier-1 contract development studio for a 3D cellphone game.

-cb

Don't listen to all these naysayers. It doesn't cost thousands of dollars to make a game. In fact, you can make a game for almost nothing. Go read the "Indie Game Development Survival Guide." If all your online features aren't too complex, and especially if you have an impressive board game prototype, then I'm sure you could find a programmer who would work in exchange for potential profit sharing.

Quote: Original post by Smoothballer
It doesn't cost thousands of dollars to make a game. ... read the "Indie Game Development Survival Guide." ... if you have an impressive board game prototype, then I'm sure you could find a programmer who would work in exchange for potential profit sharing.

Yes, by all means do read that book (BTW, has the OP ever come back and read any of this, or are we all preaching to each other?). But I do not share Smoo's confidence in the high likelihood of finding someone to program the game on spec. And besides, it takes more than programming to make a game.

But perhaps we've lost sight of the OQ. OP asked about the difficulty of making his game. I don't know why he asked that, but the answer is "of course the game isn't difficult to make." Now that the question has been answered, maybe the OP has further questions or maybe he doesn't...?