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[iggie]

You've heard of Game Jams where all the dev happens in a single weekend - well I live at the other end of the spectrum. Serious time sunk into ickle indie games.

My last project took 2500 hours, not including sound and music which I got from several talented sound guys. That is about 170 Game Jams in a row on a single project. Was the game 170 times better than a Jam game? Well no not really. It probably had 30x the play time and 5x the graphics quality.

So, flush with success I am having another go - I am 180 hours into a new 2000 hour game project. A bit quicker this time as I learnt a lot from the last game.

So, I really wanted to find out who is making games on a similar scale to this or bigger on TIGSource - it would be great to know I am not out on a crazy-indie limb.

[brog]

Don't worry about how long things take, it seriously doesn't matter.  People look at the final product, not the process that produced it.  And you get much quicker with practise, as you've already observed.

I don't track how many hours I spend on things, but I have one game I've been working on on-and-off for three years.  It's not three years worth of work, and I'm not proud of how long I spent on it or anything - I'd much rather have it finished - but so it goes.

I think lots of people here are working on long-term things.  Don't assume that most work is being put into small "jam"-type projects just because that's a lot of what you see - obviously a lot more of these can get made because they take less time.  I'm not quite sure how to say this without it being a tautology.  If I spend 1/10 of my time making 2-hour games and 9/10 making 2000-hour games, you'll see me releasing a lot more small games, but it doesn't follow that that's mostly what I make.

edit: Also, I think there's definitely a law of diminishing returns.  The amount of work goes up non-linearly as the size of a project increases.  Spending twice as long on something doesn't double the quality.

[Klaim]

My big project is on hold until I finish the first version of another project.

It have been almost 4 years since I started it.
But I couldn't really work regularly on it si I guess it's more like 2 effective years of night coding...

But it's really a big game in it's "minimal" version and should require a team of 4 people. I planned and set tools in this view.
But in the end I got to work on it alone. Some people, friend and online interested people, tried to help but were each time quicky overhelmed or had other problems.
So I'm the only guarantee that this game will be finished one day.

And I'll do it!

What makes me doubt though is that it's made to be module based and I have have a team to work on modules once the first version is out. I hope I'll find a team by the time.

[Renton]

I wouldn't worry about it. Didn't Cave Story take like 4 years to finish?

[Christian Knudsen]

I've been working on my game for at least 4 years pretty steadily. For some periods I've been working on it full-time. And it's probably only about half done. I'm not depending on it for bringing in income or anything, though. If I had to live off my game making, I'd probably spend a maximum of 6 months on a project.

I like when people embark on big and long game projects. We've got plenty of short and relatively quickly made games already -- I like following the development of a game for years. It's like watching a kid grow up.

[oahda]

I believe I started on our project about five months ago.I started over entirely a about four months minus a week ago. Work is going fine, but it has been a bit slow lately, so two days ago, I decided to make a checklist of deadlines.

I've got work planned for the next seven days now. Everything that was due yesterday is done, and half of the stuff for which I have a little less than 23 hours left to make are done, so it seems to be going fine to follow that list so far, and it's a great way to make sure progress does happen.

The game is not a game yet; I'm fleshing out the framework and the engine at the moment. It's going fine, though and just before I started writing this, I checked the last task off from the deadline list, which was a very good thing to get done. It's a 2D platformer using basic physics, and I just got the automatisation for my objects set to be influenced by physics and surroundings to fall if in the air and, if they land on solid ground, actually stay on it; now I could even just start moving an piece of ground around to make it an elevator, since that part of the physics is already automatic!

@chrknudsen:
I definitely agree with you on your last statement!

[iggie]

Thanks for the encouragement It's good to hear from other long timers!

I guess the trick is knowing when to round things up and finish it off. There is an old wilderness tradition ( Perhaps from some MacGyver episode ) where the newly come of age tribesman would run a massive circuit in a day, and all the land inside the loop he ran would be his inheritance. If he failed to complete the loop he would get nothing. I'm up for a big land grab 

[namre]

I'm still a newbie in game development so what I am planning on doing for now is to create gameplay prototypes. These are games that only have the core gameplay. I figured that this would greatly help in teaching me how to code games since I get to work on different gameplay types at such a short time.

Once I have a good list of game prototypes, and am confident in my ability and speed in creating games, that's when I'll take on bigger projects.

[fraxcell]

Lots of famous indie games (Cave Story, Iji...) were made in 4-5 years. Most games like that were made by one person, since keeping a team together for that long would be hard. I've been working on my game for about a year, and I would say I'm only a fifth of the way done. I don't think purposefully planning for a project to take years to finish is a good idea, but the great thing about being indie is you can explore your ideas however much you want.

[Klaim]

In fact, the only thing that you really have to keep in mind is that your project have no value if it's not released.

Once you really understand this, you will release a first version as soon as it is clean enough to be exposed. It can take years, but don't take more years just to add some features you've thought about while working on it. First release the first version, then work on a sequel or addon or any patch-like addition you will have time to work on later.

[iggie]

@Klaim I agree with the release point being crucial. A big part of my design process is comparing my feature wishlist against the amount of time I will need to polish and finish each one - often cutting a detail out seems to streamline the gameplay and GUI and make the game more fun, an added bonus of working to a deadline.

[Christian Knudsen]

Seconding what Klaim said. I would never have lasted this long on my project if I didn't regularly release updates and get feedback. People playing your game and giving you feedback is probably the best motivator you can get.

[namre]

In fact, the only thing that you really have to keep in mind is that your project have no value if it's not released.

Once you really understand this, you will release a first version as soon as it is clean enough to be exposed. It can take years, but don't take more years just to add some features you've thought about while working on it. First release the first version, then work on a sequel or addon or any patch-like addition you will have time to work on later.

Wow. Really good advice. I've never thought about doing it that way.

[jay]

In fact, the only thing that you really have to keep in mind is that your project have no value if it's not released[...]First release the first version, then work on a sequel or addon or any patch-like addition you will have time to work on later.

I would never have lasted this long on my project if I didn't regularly release updates and get feedback. People playing your game and giving you feedback is probably the best motivator you can get.

I only just came to that realisation myself about a short time ago, and I definitely agree that it's pretty much critical, certainly for someone like me.

It makes sense for any number of reasons. A big one being that (as Klaim said) no-one is really going to care about your design until it's out there in some form. You'll get some kind words from indie fans and fellow devs, but you're unlikely to build any following unless you've got a track record of finished games behind you, and even then it's often pretty niche.

Dwarf Fortress would be just another pie-in-the-sky "they're never gonna manage that" project if they hadn't been releasing playable builds all this time. Likewise, Cortex Command would be all but forgotten, and Mount & Blade would never have grown the massive grass-roots fan following it had, long before it was anywhere near finished. For an even more current example, there's the buzz in strategy circles around the Frozen Synapse beta.

The sooner you can get people playing, the sooner word can get around. Also, developing and updating a released project can generate a lot of goodwill (and, crucially, keep people coming back for more), even if you're not adding any more content than you would have done by just building it in isolation and releasing it to the public in one big chunk. Certainly if you're doing it for free, I think. Not to mention that you're getting masses more testing and feedback than you would otherwise, which isn't to be sniffed at either. And at an early enough stage that you can potentially make considerable changes without ditching a boatload of existing content.

So as soon as it's basically functional and stable at a level that showcases the core essentials, my game's going out there for sure.

[bateleur]

One of my games I've been working on since 1994. Not the same codebase of course - it's been written to beta level four times now in three different languages (BBC Basic V, ARM Assembler, Java).

The funny thing is, each time it got played once, taking all day to play, was awesome fun and had to be binned as a result of the playtest. (The third version was the best. The game was won in a single turn by one of the teams by building a giant robot to complete all their objectives for them!)

I plan to rewrite it again sometime in the next five years. Either in Flash or Unity, I haven't decided yet. I think I've finally worked out how to avoid some of the problems... game design is hard!

[iggie]

@bateleur That sounds like fun - but the complexity and length is scary! I think if Ispot my design looking too big to finish I will cut it down. I agree that lots changes after beta - it is such an interesting phase of the project.

I am interested by the release early idea - it would take a couple of months to get my current game mechanics ready for even a beta release, but as @cheeba says it is work that I would have done anyway in the end. The extreme of this is the Release-Any-Day method where you could theoretically trigger a release build at any stage of the project... a technique that might come in useful later on when unforeseen deadlines/opportunites appear.

[Hamletz]

andre stern took no time and no money and is becoming to a good game."
I think in the end the game does not matter at all it is simply a mean end.
 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

most of the games i like (besides short experimental games) are the games that took 2-3 years to make. it's not particularly strange for a game to take that long. aquaria and iji and glum buster took about 3 years each, and they're probably my three most-favorite indie games. a lot of other successful indie games took 3 years too: braid, etc.

of course, sometimes you spend 3+ years on a game and nobody likes it or very few people pay attention to it (that happened to a degree with shrepog's game umbrella adventure for instance) so it's good to get it into playtesting early, with a large number of people, to make sure you aren't wasting your time on something that won't be very fun when it's done.

[Craig Stern]

I've been working on Telepath RPG: Servants of God for more than 2 and a half years. I wholeheartedly agree that releasing the latest build of your game periodically and harvesting fan enthusiasm is a great way to keep your motivation up.

[Triplefox]

I did a 10-month indie project(the one in my sig) just to see what would happen by taking on something big and indulgent and solo. "No guts no glory" one might say, but I also had the incentive of unemployment benefits to feed my indulgence. End result: Learned a lot, no profit. I made something appropriately big and unfocused, and even after quite a lot of playtesting, it loses most of its audience in the preloader and the tutorial. The months of work spent on content are a triumph of excess.

So I'm turning the lessons learned towards the opposite approach - something tiny and focused - and collaborative! It has meandered a bit, design-wise, but we're nailing down something solid finally after about a month of iteration. It is a one level tower defense. It has physics.

If I do another big thing it'll probably be more overtly feature-centric instead of content-centric. Content is what you do if you have monies to blow away.