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Game Programming Question

Started by brown student 6 replies 800+ views
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brown student
brown student
Hi everyone, I am doing a research paper this summer for my CS class about game development. Basically, I am writing the paper on game development from start to finish. Below are some questions I need information on. Any help would be greatly appreciated! What is the average number of programmers needed for a game? Typically how long does it take to program a game from scratch? How much money does it cost per year to develop your typical PC game? I think that's it, any other information you guys want to give would be awesome. Thanks again!
Kaze
Kaze
it completly depends on what you want to make,
is it a pong clone or a mmorpg, cause that would make a diffrence
brown student
brown student
I guess I would be looking for MMOG game information, anything sports or RTS would be helpful as well.

Thanks!
Kaze
Kaze
one last factor would also be the teams experiance

MMOG are very complex and not even worth trying unless your team has a lot of experiance, even for a profesional game company

sports would be easyer as the basic premis of the game is very simple and creating a working prototype is easy and from there its just adding good art and ai and other misc fearutes

not sure how helpfull this is, just hard to estimate with so many variables
JBourrie
JBourrie
A good estimate for the cost of a normal commercial game is $100,000 per team member per year (this isn't a salary thing, just a good estimate of total cost).

Go to Moby Games to get credits lists for pretty much every game out there.

Time frames are estimated 1-3 years for most commercial games (smaller time frame for indie and handheld games)


Tom Sloper has a more detailed look at game finances here
mattnewport
mattnewport
Look up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra - they often give info on how many people were on the team and how long the game took to develop (though I don't think they often list budget).

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