TIGSource Forums

Hi all

After spending some time reading through this thread (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=20558.0) i was interested to see the number of people posting to comment on wether or not Ardbob would be able to complete the task he had set himself.

I am compelled to discuss this a little, as i have a bit of a story to tell that leads somewhere, however i am creating this new thread, as i didnt think it too appropriate to hikack his help request thread.

Back when i was 12 (i am now 30, if youre wondering) i started writing a written story. Inspired by the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone fighting fantasy books, i created a very very large roleplaying game on paper that had rules played out with dice.
The game had 1480 locations, each of them unique and described only in words, not with graphics or sound, as of course it was a book. (For reference, these books were 'played' by turning to different numbered paragraphs to make choices depending on what you wanted to do, a set of predefined choices was presented to you each time, unless of course you died, then your adventure ended and you had to restart, ugh).

Now, this book took me a good 2 years to complete, at which point i ended up with about 400 pages of handwritten book, and nothing to do with it. When i got a PC, for no reason, i decided to type it all into a huge word document. This took me a considerable number of (thinking about it, rather boring) weeks.

Again, i did nothing with this 400-page word document for some years.

Several years later, i was 19 and at university. Bored one evening i found the typed up manuscript on my hard disk, and decided that maybe i should turn it into a game.
After all, all the gameplay rules were there, and the game content in terms of text was all there, all i needed to do was to go through the text, parsing it with a perl script, and turning it into a markup language that some kind of game engine could navigate.

This task took me a year, after which other people jumped on board and started bombarding me with feature requests, so i spent another few months creating an admin backend where people could extend the game through markup. The game swelled to 2500 locations.

In short, game development on this ceased in 2005, but by that time, on and off i had spent a good 12 years on this game, including time in between on other projects.

So, this is where i am going with this:

In my opinion and in my experience it is possible for a one-man-band to write a 20+ hour RPG (mine takes around 24 hours to complete, this is if you don't die, and even then you will only get to see the bare minimum of its locations and secrets) BUT:
(1) to accomplish this, you would probably have to do what i did and write it all as text and (2) you would probably get no interest in the completed product because i quickly found that nobody really likes to play text adventures.

But, if anyones up for the challenge the game is still up and running here (http://www.ssod.org) and playable. I challenge anyone here to complete it, if you manage to finish the game within 24 hours of solid play (i can see how long youve been regsitered for in the backend, as its a webapp) then i will ..... heh. I have no money. I shall be pleasently surprised.

The challenge is announced, and the story told. So yes, indies can write very long RPGs, but they must take shortcuts and the road is measured in decades, not the nine to twelve months most new developers set themselves.

Please discuss. :-)

this really depends on if you use an engine, on the team size, and how complete the design document was (for instance, does it have the dialogue/script all written out? if not, that's another few months just to write all the dialogue)

it also depends on the production values; if you make it using 8-bit graphics it'd be a lot easier to make than if it's hi-res 2d or in 3d

but to give you a good estimate, i've been working on my game 'saturated dreamers' for 4 years so far, and it's about 80% done. it should be at least 20 hours on average to complete. it's not a rpg, but it's vaguely similar (more like a zelda game)

aquaria was also a 20 hour game, and it took about 3 years to complete if i'm remembering correctly, with a team of 2

so i'd say you should expect at least 3 years, and potentially up to 5 years (particularly if it's your first large-scale game and if you're doing it alone, without a team). but this varies greatly, depending on specifics, as i mentioned. i think a fair estimation would be between 2 and 10 years, with the largest likelihood between 3 and 5 years (and this is working on the game *full time*, i mean)

in other words, it'd take about as much effort as it would take to go through college. college is also typically 3-5 years for most people, when done full time. but like college, it varies; some people take 20 credits a semester and finish quickly, others take 12 credits a semester and fail classes and need to retake them and finish slowly.

i'm not sure what he meant actually -- some people refer to creating a game as 'writing a game', so it could be either; now that i re-read the post i'm confused by what he meant

it also seems that part of his question is asking how long it'd take a person to *play* the game? and part of it is asking that someone else turn his rpg into a game?

Hi all,

To summarise what i actually meant was to provide an example of  how long it takes the average person to go from an idea to writing something that is a computer game that plays for 20+ hours.

The game that i started when i was 13 as written text took me about 13 years to bring to fruition as a playable web based game. I don't need someone to write or rewrite it for me, those times are long gone for me and i have moved on to other games :-)

The conclusion, in short, was "it will take many years" :-)

Interesting stuff. Thanks for posting. I only know adventure games, but plotting and dialog take vastly different amounts of time.

Plotting a new adventure only takes about two days (because I use existing books) but working out the detailed dialog and "what happens if" takes weeks. I sometimes envy people who can make a complete casual game in less than a month.

Me too! Thirteen years is how long it took me to go from planning my first game to having something that other people said was worth playing. The people at indiegamer was horrified, and said if I couldn't get a game finished in a couple of months I should do something different. :)

I do agree with you on all points, but the point i am trying to make with my story is simply that even though you could get it done faster, for 99% of people, real life gets in the way. Standing in my way of getting this all done in a year were senior school, college, university, several relationships, friendships and holding down part time and full time jobs.

So, even though you budget a year for a game, that year of development time is split for most people over a maximum of four hours a day, so this man-year of time soon becomes much more than you anticipated.

Combine that with people leaving the project and having to find replacements (i keep running into this right now with smaller projects) and it becomes very hard to keep things together.

Anyway, i didnt post this to pick fault with your timeframe, i think it is great that you even want to try and have planned, when there are so many people who would give up before they even start. Not everyone could do what we people here do.
This was meant really to be an informative real-life story of how long it takes the average person to come up with something like this. Of course, if i started now age 30 it may take me even longer. I have even less free time, with a family and kids in the mix. :-)

If you were to do it all again, it probably wouldn't take you all that time.

When you've never done something before, it can take a long time to get through it. But once you know how to do something, you can run through it like lightning.

Reminds me of the original Zak sequel, Exactly that happened, over 12 years from 1996-2008.
http://zak-site.com/zak2b.htm

I followed it with frustration as half a game would get made, everyone would drift away, someone else would start again... and finally they gave up. It's a huge problem for non-commercial games.