A little background: I am doing a Master's degree on Management of Information Systems, but I am from a Business Management background, not from an IT background.

I am currently doing the final thesis, on Project Management for Video Game Development, and while I am solid on the overall project management elements, I am not that knowledgeable about video game production.

I need your help on two things:

- Imagine that you are developing a Price of Persia type of action adventure game, for smartphones and tablets. What would be the most time consuming elements to develop for that game?

- What would be an "ideal" 13-people (including the Project Manager) project team to develop a demo for a soccer game, in 4 months, ignoring QA. What would be the definition of the responsibilities of those people?

Thank you very much!

1. Imagine that you are developing a Price of Persia type of action adventure game, for smartphones and tablets. What would be the most time consuming elements to develop for that game?
2. What would be an "ideal" 13-people (including the Project Manager) project team to develop a demo for a soccer game, in 4 months, ignoring QA.

3. What would be the definition of the responsibilities of those people?

1. The programming takes the most time.

2. It would be a very limited game, with not very many features, with so little time and so few people.

3. See http://sloperama.com/advice/lesson7.htm and http://sloperama.com/advice/lesson10.htm - you need programmers, designers, artists, and audio people. Your programmers will be the bulk of the personnel, with artists the second most numerous, and you need different specializations among those two disciplines.

I'm a little confused by the OP. First it talks about Prince of Persia, then it asks about "a soccer game".

PoP was art heavy. The 2008 game credits list if I count them correctly had 48 programmers, 62 artists and 27 animators.

Mechanics-heavy games do generally need more programmers than artists, perhaps up to a 2:3 ratio. At the extreme there are many games that do not have any artists at all. Text based games don't require art, nor do simple games requiring only lines, squares, and circles.

Art-heavy games tend to be the opposite, it could easily go 3:2 the other direction with a few more artists/animators/modelers than programmers.

As for "a soccer game", that could mean just about anything and may require zero artists. Best bet for estimating a ratio of developers is to look at game credits of games similar to then one you want and scale the numbers down to the size of team you need.