Hi guys,

Firstly I'll apologise if this question has been asked before but I'm hoping my request is specific enough to be novel. So I'm working with the Enterprise department of my university and they would like to have created a management simulator with educational properties and I'm hoping to get some information on the likely costs of commissioning something like this from scratch, as well as the likely costs of alternatives such as reskinning an existing game and altering some mechanics, learning game maker studio or any other alternatives you can think of.

Also for any of you who have some experience in this type of project what would you estimate as the likely working hours and development time needed for these options.

Thank you,
C.Endswell

Unfortunately I suspect your request is so specific as to have no precedent.

The cost of commissioning a game is a "how long is a piece of string?" question - the price depends on the project plan, which would include all the various features and requirements.

"Reskinning" a game usually implies consent from the original creator; as such, the time and cost of such an endeavour would depend on how much the original creator chose to charge you for the privilege, on top of whatever changes you might wish to make - and the difficulty of those changes depends in turn on how the original game was implemented. So that's 2 pieces of string rather than 1.

I would suggest drawing up a short set of requirements that goes into more detail than "management sim with educational properties" and then it might be easier to give a very rough estimate.

costs of commissioning something

Not sure what you mean by "commissioning." If you mean "hiring a developer"
then this is a Production/Management question. So I'm moving it to the
appropriate forum.