Sites like Big Fish Games are mostly for casual games. You are going to find it very hard to get them to pick up a RPG. They are quite picky in what games they take even if they are "casual". It would be pretty hard to make a casual RPG. Casual doesn't mean light on stats or combat, it means something you can play for five minutes on your coffee break and forget about it for the rest of the day. Think Facebook games.

I created a fairly unique physics based match 3 game using Playfirst's PlaygroundSDK. There were very few physics based games using Playground at the time (or maybe even none) so I figured the game would be a shoe in for them to pick up but they passed. The seven or eight other portals we submitted to passed on it as well. For the casual portals you need create a game that caters to the portals and not the other way around.

The budget of the game was $0. I did all the programming myself and had a good friend do all the art for free on the promise we would split any profits. The sound guy was to get $1000 once we got paid. But there was still no cash out of pocket for the entire game. To hire professionals to make the game for me would be a different story. A professional programmer I would expect to pay at least $5k/month for. An RPG is going to be no short haul either, you are probably looking at least a good year of development.

My completely off the top of my head without knowing any real information budget: 3x programmers @ $5,000 + 2x artists @ $4,000 x 12 months = $228,000. Add at least another 20% on top of that for licensing costs and other cost overruns gives you a grand total of $276,300. Thats for the complete game. If you are just looking for a prototype that would be polished enough to warrant somebody investing in it that would probably be four or five months of work so ~$95,000. Sure you could get some kids or college students to work for $10/hour but if you want a real chance of getting your prototype done you are going to want professionals. You could also try profit sharing but that is a joke, you most likely won't get anybody who could complete the game for some imaginary profits a year and half down the road.

I should note that $5k/month is only around $30/hour. You could easily get in the $50/hour+ range for a good freelance programmer which greatly increases the overall cost.

Quote: Original post by swiftcoder

Quote: Original post by JDX_John
How long will it take to make? Are we talking one guy working full-time for a month?

This is an RPG, being built on an FPS engine. Being an RPG automatically pushes you into the long-haul category, and adapting the engine is going to take even more time.

He said he wants a prototype not the full game. So I'm not sure the RPG part is a big deal, not much content needed.

Quote:

Quote: Looking at programmer salaries isn't to relevant because you won't be employing someone. You can get a decent coder freelance at $50/hr

How isn't it relevant? Figuring a fairly normal, 40 hour work-week, $50/hour *is* $100,000/year.

Because employment and contract/freelance rates shouldn't be considered interchangeable. Looking at salary charts can be misleading because salaries include benefits. It's only a coincidence $50/hr is about $100k/year, based on me picking $50 as a nice round number. You might get someone quite capable of coding a prototype for half that, or you might have to pay double to get someone you really want depending if you want a seasoned contractor or a hobbyist-turned-freelancer.