I'm not sure that's possible to estimate.
Right, my question was kind of vague, it hugely depends on the type of game...
Generally speaking, especially for an indie project, assets are the most difficult thing to afford -- especially for a content-driven game. Projects can be made with very efficient asset loads though, and just the same projects can require tremendous amounts of developer time (for proprietary content, or longterm gameplay tuning, etc)
I recently got the impression that there's a trend that more of the budget is generally spent on assets (in average) than the rest of the games, also in indie games?
On a personal note though, i was just curious, because i want to do more graphics. I'm just baffled how much effort it takes to make state-of-the-art 3D assets, you know..
I mean, i can prototype a simple game in a couple of hours, gameplay-wise. But to make a single 3D model (something simple, like a fully textured door, with all the materials, and some animations and everything) it takes me usually more than a day! Wow... so i simply couldn't guess how much work goes into the content portion of a state of the art game...
3d aaa game guesses: Props can be as quick a workday, depending on complexity (and whether you can re-use elements or materials from a library,) or much longer. Environments are difficult for me to estimate -- I heard a figure in an interview ballparking some uncharted 4 environments at a year of man hours (so, abt 6 months two artists.) They weren't the most complex ones, but they might have had very few things that could be re-used and therefor taken unusually long. Characters are between a few weeks and a couple months usually. Not sure how to estimate animations or FX, but studios hire fulltime fx artists and animators so it takes at least 1 dev cycle * several animators and fx artists to fill them out.
Art is very expensive - the only (small) consolation is that generally production artists of similar experience to programmers are much cheaper to hire.
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