Development time

[Dogmeat]

Hi, new to the boards.  Just curious how long projects have taken many of you.  Of course, I imagine it varies wildly depending on the depth of the game and your experience with programming, but a general idea of how long your first project took you might help me ballpark how long it would take me on a first try.

Thanks!

[billybob884]

Well, I'm still on my first project, and it will be about a year beginning of September. Of course, thats with the 2 week set back (two of them actually) for midterms and finals, and a month and 1/2 during the winter when my computer died and I had to catch up a lot of stuff I lost. So, maybe about 6 months collectively? I'm on the 4th level.

[bluemonkmn]

I think the time it takes to finish a game using the Scrolling Game Development Kit varies wildly, even more than the time it takes to complete a project without it.  I say that because a normal game project would require some minimum amount of effort to get anything interesting working and that would probably take no less than a week (and could take months to get an engine that supports some of the features of the kit).  But with the Scrolling Game Development Kit, depending on the type of game you want to create, I imagine it would be be possible to finish creating a game in a day, so it opens up the range (on the low end of the time scale) even more.

Now that's probably not true of a first project (couldn't create a first project within a day), unless your first project is incredibly simple, because it will take some time just to familiarize yourself with the features of the kit and how to use it (might be worth spending 8 hours on just that -- try the tutorials and look at the Game Academy project).  But there I really can't predict how things will go.  Some people remark on how intuitive it is and how powerful it is and how it can do so much without coding and it really helps.  Others remark on how clumsy it is and how different from other tools it is and how hard to learn it is, and they give up on it.  So I don't know who to believe there.  My suspicion is that the people who don't like it are trying to make it be like other software they've used when it isn't, and they don't give it a fair chance.  But of course I'm biased.

[Dogmeat]

Thanks a ton for the feedback.

[Eastfist]

My first project was called Runsetter. That took me about 1 week. Of course, that's after I learned from the Quick tutorial (I still think that's pretty important that you have to grasp the abstract idea of a red circle becoming a fully animated and interactive "character") But of course, I learned that in a programming class and makes me lose some credibility with non-scripters, eh?

To add, but hopefully not to scare you away, I've been working on the REAL Runsetter for about a year now. One can learn a lot in a year (out of almost the three years I've been using SGDK). I mean, I've released a ton of demos. Those represent my learning progress.

So it's important to always keep learning. I guess that's my advice.