10 minutes ago, Infinisearch said:

Is this a reference to unity?  If not what do you mean by 'pickups'?

If you are using Unity the hardest part will be getting in game art if you can't afford assets from the unity asset store.  Art will essentially be your limiting factor.  If you come up with a game idea with a clear picture of the game rules coding it won't be that hard if you're using unity since there are lots of unity tutorials available on how unity does things.  If you're quick at picking up things and can be logical at breaking down problems I'd say you could make a pretty good game in a year, but only if you can get your hands on art assets.  But as is commonly recommended on this website start smaller... breakout, tic-tac-toe, space invaders ....  So spend year one on smaller projects that build up your skills and problem solving ability.  Then move on to something bigger.

ok but really how hard can it be to do a dark souls like game?

people do hatsune miku models all the time on metaseq so how hard can it be to do an anime-style character on blender?

and there some tutorials on doing soulike like in sharp accent so programming shouldn't take decades

i could skip on character creation like Nioh and Nier that would save a huge deal of time

how long would it really take?

1 hour ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

ok but really how hard can it be to do a dark souls like game?

people do hatsune miku models all the time on metaseq so how hard can it be to do an anime-style character on blender?

and there some tutorials on doing soulike like in sharp accent so programming shouldn't take decades

i could skip on character creation like Nioh and Nier that would save a huge deal of time

how long would it really take?

 

I don't think the character creation system in Dark Souls is that big a deal to implement, if you compare it to the rest of the game.

But let's turn this around a bit.

Do you think the developers behind Dark Souls are a group of incompetent or inexperienced people? (Keep in mind Dark Souls is at least their 3rd game in a very similar type of game experience.)

Just on the programming side, there's almost 20 people listed in the credits of Dark Souls. Their previous game (Demon's Souls) was released 2 years before Dark Souls. Some people would most likely have started on Dark Souls before Demon's Souls was completed, but let's be on the "games don't take long to develop" side of things, and say they developed the game from start to finish in 2 years.

Just on the programming side, that turns into roughly 40 man years of programming work required.

Add in the fact that they had a lot of code, tools, etc. that they could most likely reuse in order to make Dark Souls quicker than a pure "from scratch" game. Additionally, these years come from developers who have already invested many many years into learning their skill.

The logic is similar for the other aspects of the game -- art, sound, level design, enemy design, story, QA, etc.

If it was so easy to make a Dark Souls game, why did Dark Souls take so long to develop?

Why didn't FromSoftware just hire 5 students and have the game finished in a year? It would have been much cheaper, after all. So what was FromSoftware's reason for spending years, with probably close to 60+ people working on it?

18 minutes ago, Lactose said:

I don't think the character creation system in Dark Souls is that big a deal to implement, if you compare it to the rest of the game.

 

But let's turn this around a bit.

Do you think the developers behind Dark Souls are a group of incompetent or inexperienced people? (Keep in mind Dark Souls is at least their 3rd game in a very similar type of game experience.)

Just on the programming side, there's almost 20 people listed in the credits of Dark Souls. Their previous game (Demon's Souls) was released 2 years before Dark Souls. Some people would most likely have started on Dark Souls before Demon's Souls was completed, but let's be on the "games don't take long to develop" side of things, and say they developed the game from start to finish in 2 years.

Just on the programming side, that turns into roughly 40 man years of programming work required.

Add in the fact that they had a lot of code, tools, etc. that they could most likely reuse in order to make Dark Souls quicker than a pure "from scratch" game. Additionally, these years come from developers who have already invested many many years into learning their skill.

The logic is similar for the other aspects of the game -- art, sound, level design, enemy design, story, QA, etc.

 

If it was so easy to make a Dark Souls game, why did Dark Souls take so long to develop?

Why didn't FromSoftware just hire 5 students and have the game finished in a year? It would have been much cheaper, after all. So what was FromSoftware's reason for spending years, with probably close to 60+ people working on it?

lets shove dark souls aside for a second

suppose i want to do a game with minecraft level of graphics

3rd person with a camera that tracks the enemy and the ability to dodge based on iframes

how long would it take to get the main character and 1 enemy in a white room working?

if it takes more than a year to do that with unity then i might as well give up

3 minutes ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

how long would it take to get the main character and 1 enemy in a white room working?

Depending on your skill level when it comes to modelling, animation and programming, maybe 2-4 weeks doing everything on your own to get some prototype of that specific mechanic working. (Personally, I couldn't do the animation + modelling on my own, and would have to rely on someone else for that, but could probably have some code for it up and running over a weekend).

Turning that prototype into something fun, polished, good and filled with content? Most likely years.

3 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

what sort of game could i reasonably expect to create in 1 year?

Just now, ObjectivityGuy said:

how long would it take to get the main character and 1 enemy in a white room working?

The difficulty with these is that everybody is different.  What one person could do in a few hours may take another person weeks.  A person who used a tool or language professionally every day for years will have radically different speed than someone picking it up for the first time.  A person who is implementing a system similar to one they've developed many times will likely build something better and easier to use than a person who has never worked on that type of system before.

A common challenge to help game developers learn their actual pace is to build a game in a month.  Figure out what you think you can make in a month and spend the month building it.  At the end of the month that project is done. Don't keep working on it. Write up your experiences, what went wrong, what went right, if you didn't finish what you wanted record why that was, etc.  Then start the next month with a brand new project with new goals.

We do not know how long it would take you to do anything because we don't know you.

We do know, however, that you won't make a game that looks and feels like a major game as a lone developer, because they invest tens of thousands of work-hours (or more) on the project.  Minecraft started as a single person project eight years ago, but today's Minecraft is a bad comparison as it has about 1500 work-years in the project with enormous teams. 

31 minutes ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

the ability to dodge based on iframes

Whats an iframe?  

8 minutes ago, Infinisearch said:

Whats an iframe?  

Invincibility frame.

It's a mechanic in various combat-based games. During certain animations (notably dodging by e.g. jumping away or rolling), the character is invincible/takes no damage. In some games, the "window of invincibility" (awesome band name btw) is also affected by the character's stats -- e.g. a higher Evasion stat leading to more iframes in the given animation.

Compare with blocking (which often reduces damage, and is often not as sensitive to timing) and parrying (where a succesfully parry will often yield to a counter-attack or the attacker being left off-guard for a moment).

Of course, different games and gamers tend to call these concepts different things, and have various details to them that differentiate them.

4 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

what sort of game could i reasonably expect to create in 1 year?

Assuming you have no programming experience nor skill in art or music...I would say you could make a rather nifty Asteroids, Tetris or Space Invaders style game.

It would take you six months to learn a language and basic skills with MS Paint and a sound/music package.  A further three months gettting to grips with a media api and the remaining three months to actually make it.

That, at least, can be done.

2 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

lets shove dark souls aside for a second

suppose i want to do a game with minecraft level of graphics

If unity can import the graphics and animations that you create its pretty simple to get something on the screen.  But your engine needs to support the animation type (vertex vs skinned mesh) you create... I don't know what minecraft uses and I don't know what unity supports.

2 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

3rd person with a camera that tracks the enemy and the ability to dodge based on iframes

I haven't really used Unity in a long time and when I did I was just getting familiar so I don't know how exactly to do that.  But I did a quick google search and it seems that the lock on will have to be implemented by you.  Also the dodge thing will also have to be implemented by you.

2 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

how long would it take to get the main character and 1 enemy in a white room working?

if it takes more than a year to do that with unity then i might as well give up

Again with what art?  Are you gonna make it?  Are you gonna buy it?  If you have a model its not that hard to get it into unity and on the screen.  Why don't you download unity and some of the free assets from the asset store and spend two weeks playing with it...?  It will give you a better idea of how fast you will learn, what is involved, and other such things.

edit - Oh and thanks @Lactose for explaining iframes.

If you want to do it alone, you can't make a full fledged 3d dark souls, but you could very well make a 2d souls-like in a year. The engines today make it easy to work with 3d, that's not the problem. The problem with 3d is creating the assets and good looking ones. It's a lot easier for a non-artist to make a bunch of good 2d art than to make good 3d art. I've seen other more complex games be replicated by single developers in 2d so it's very possible.