How long would it take you to make a level of your favourite retro game in Unity?

How long would it take you to make a level of your favourite retro game in Unity?

Unity and modern computers mean you have so much more power than any retro game developer could dream of and a system that makes it very easy to write games.

So the challenge is to post your favourite retro game and an estimate of the time it would take to develop a level of that game in Unity.

If you make a time estimate please break it down into elements (people make more realistic estimates when they think about the details):

Game Title (with screenshot or ideally video including first level)

1. 10 2D Sprites [1 hr]
2. 6 sfx [1 hr]
3. 1 song [2 hr]
4. Level layout [1 hr]
5. Controller [1 hr]
6. Player Character [1 hr]
7. Enemy Characters [2 hr]
8. Collectable elements [1 hr]
9. UI [2 hr]
10. Playtesting [1 hr]

Estimated to build time: 13 hrs.

Then if you can spare the time, and you attempt to make the game's first level and see how long it takes and report back with an update.

If anyone has good tips or tricks they know or find along the way to speed up their game development, please share?

Also if you do make the level, what do you think Unity could improve to make the development process faster?

 

Doom I:

I think a reasonable estimate would be around one month minimum due to textures/artwork, but it can easily take more time than that.

I most likely would be able to make a prototype much faster using "untexture low-poly style", but it wouldn't have any music or sounds in it.

^^^People do not work at this kind of speed. Multiply sample time by factor of 10 or twenty.
-----

Working 15 hours per day reduces number of days worked.

Editor needs better navigation (something similar to blender's hotkeys), but this is pretty much it

 

I think your 1hr estimates for making sprites etc is grossly underestimating, lol. I can think of several good platformer games or shootemups on the Amiga for example where making even one level probably would take several months.

 

How about rather than pulling these numbers out of thin air you just try doing it yourself and then tell us how long it took. If it's only 13h in your estimate, that's basically no time at all, right?

 

I was thinking of retro 8 bit games with minimal colours and sprite sizes/animation e.g. Pacman / Manic Miner / Space Invaders.

And I have done a few Ludum Dare games now so yes I do think you could create a single level in that sort of timeframe.

But like all strategies (which is what an estimate is) I'm sure it would not survive contact with the Enemy (in this case actual development).

Think of it as a time management / estimation challenge.

OK I will but not sure which game I should do as I have already re-made most of my childhood classics.

 

Ah, okay sorry. I thought you were just blowing hot air because that estimation seemed ridiculously short to me. In that case, just ignore my comment. It would certainly take me a lot longer to make a game like that, but I'm much more of an artist than a programmer.

 

Your right the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

You could still give it a go, just add in some padding time for programming/learning, choose a game with a simple mechanic (not far from the learning sections examples!). Or you could try one of the graphical programming solutions e.g. playmaker.

Anyway one of my favourite retro games...

My before starting estimate:

Spoiler: Pre Work Estimate

Cannon Fodder Level 1 Estimate Before Working
1 Jungle Trees
1 Grass
1 Bird Flying Over
1 Soldier Sprites 4d
1 Enemy Sprites 4d
1 UI Sprites
Chevron
Grende
Rocket

1 Sfx Shooting
1 Sfx Dying

5 Music

2 Level Layout

1 Movement
1 Bullets
2 Playtesting
2 Bits and Bobs

21 hours

My actual time spent:

Spoiler: How long it really took

About 5-6 hours.
--Minus--
Music
Good Artwork
Good Animation
UI Elements / Individual Troop Control (it's follow troop leader)
Bird
Rockets and Grenades (Not sure you have these in the first level)
Also may have got controls wrong, e.g. LMB Move RMB Shoot at CrossHairs!

The result ->

Spoiler: The Result

https://arowx.itch.io/cannon-fodder-rru

 

Well, see you next year

 

It IS ridiculously short.

I have few very fast competition entries, those timeframes are very unrealistic.

• One sprite definitely does not take 10 minutes.
• One fully animated character model can be done at 3 hours at fastest speed and only if there's no texturing required, and animation cuts every corner.
• One musical tune can easily take a day or several.
• PLaytesting in one hour is not happening.
• Controller script takes longer than a hour to write.
• Level layout will take WAY more than 1 hour, unless the level is an empty square room.
• etc.

So, yeah, those estimates are unrealistic.

 

Yeah, I thought so too, hence my kinda snippy comment for him to try it out himself. Usually, comments like "oh, it's just going to take 10 minutes" are only made by people who haven't tried it themselves and don't know how much time it actually takes to make a game. But I'm glad he's actually going to try it out himself and see how long it'll take.

I'm really curious to see the result of that.

 

My guestimate 3hrs pong? Nope?

 

Done

 

Fixed controls LMB Move RMB Shoot.

Postmortem:

Used 5.5 so no tilemap, that was a pain, just randomly generated the grass tiles under handset trees.

This is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version of Cannon Fodder Level 1, with programmer art and usfx created sound fx. I think it just about manages to recreate a shallow copy of the original and is nowhere near on pixel art and animation levels.

So can you take a retro game you like/love and remake a MVP version in Unity in a short space of time?

 

3 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 16 hours!

+- 10 minutes

 

? Game ?

 

Asteroids!

 

I just have to figure out what my favorite retro game is.

You've crippled me with indecision.

 

Well @Arowx you and I each made a Space Invaders game in Unity last year using our preferred development styles and I think that was surely no more than 13 hours? Had to be because I remember working on it and writing posts about the development style I was using at the same time. Plus we made different builds for performance tests.

I'd say your 13 hours is very reasonable for a Space Invaders or Asteroids game. Something like that.

BUT...

As others have mentioned and I have mentioned so much people are "sick & tired" of it (lol)... it really comes down to the presentation. That is the bottleneck. That is the time-sink.

While people can (and some do I am sure) iterate near endlessly on programming (or even game design) most people do not. At least outside of assets for the store. Not from what I have seen anyway. Most folks seem to iterate for a long time on the graphics.

And that is what makes the projects vary so much in time. That is what makes most game projects take so much time to complete.

If you're thinking just knocking out sprites in 1 or 2 colors and call them done then I think your original estimate is quite reasonable.

But most people won't see it that way because they are used to either iterating for a long time on graphics themselves OR they are used to seeing the results of other people iterating on graphics for a long time.

A single sprite image can vary in time from 1 minute to a couple of hours (or more!). That is how much impact the graphics can have on the scope of work & time required to complete a game.

Which is why I've been focusing on finding a minimal solution because I do see it as a huge issue that needs to be overcome.

But anyway yeah I am sure you can knock out your Cannon Fodder level in your 21 hours. At least a huge chunk of it. IF.... IF... you don't waste hours and hours just on the graphics. Redrawing the very same things over and over. Touching up the images over and over.

OOPS! I forgot to mention the same thing can easily be done on the sound FX and music just that again... for some reason most people don't seem to focus nearly as long on the audio as they do on graphics. But they still have the same potential for time-sinks.

Good luck!

 

Months and months. Actually I'm trying to sort of do this right now by making a Star Fox clone.

The problem I'm currently struggling with is getting the damn thing to FEEL the same. The majority of time I've spent on this project has been trying to get the aiming to not only feel similar, but work consistently.

 

Months for level editor alone
now a few years in the backlog

 

Do you mean the player control or something else? Wondering if maybe you are relying on Unity physics and that is part of the problem?

 

What do you find the biggest challenge to be in making the level editor? Couldn't you just use a tile map editor for this and save a lot of time?

 

Biggest hurdle was that I was recovering from having gallstones coming out of my urinary tract, started this about 1 or 2 weeks after

I made parser of the original level data file (cross referencing this) in VS studio that outputs readable text/strings. This took approximately 2 weeks, where I can already know what tiles hold what object at which location. Something like "Room 1, Tiles 3, Floor".

Someone had already extracted the image resources, so I just use that and made prefabs out of them using 1 pixel = 1 unit as a base.

The biggest challenge I faced was actually the tiling system.

The original game uses a technique called magic link. A level is made up of limited number of rooms. Rooms are made of 10x3 tiles. Links to each room are referenced by ID, and room will only load 1 at a time.

This is the part of design I was trying to change, I wanted navigation to be seamless, metroidvania style.
Placing the rooms next to each other was the easy part. Trying to store them in a grid on the other hand... So I asked around in Gamedev.net. Some folks gave me a few pointers on the grid structure, I think I understood what they taught

Was working on it on and off between nights and weekends. Eventually I got another paid project coming in, so I halted development.

Development was slow because I was trying to make the source freely available to the public, so I didn't use any assets from the store (except Progrids, if I remember correctly the publisher name was 6by7 before changing to Procore).

This was of course back in 2014, I was short of 1 year using Unity professionally If you ask me to do it now, probably I can get up something in a month or two for a complete editor.

 

I mean months and months for the entire project, although getting the feel of a game right can be very time consuming if some of my previous FPS games are any indication.

Spoiler: Current Problem

My problem currently is just replicating the aiming from the original game (in a way that works). Currently it's setup like this (original game in the corner):


Problem is that the reticles can be misleading about the projectile's path, as it's only accurate at certain distances. You can end up with situations where the reticle is directly over a target, but the projectile sails straight past because the target is too close (or far):


Using the two separate reticles for different distances is also a no go, because judging the distance of the targets is pretty difficult and you can never be sure which reticle to aim with.

 

Well that all explains it. You made something very true to original as far as actually being able to load the original map data even, custom level editor, etc. Plus medical and other time off.

 

Greaf stuff. I wish we had more posts and entire threads on this kind of stuff. It's odd how for a game dev forum there seems to be little actual game dev talk ("in the trenches" talk focused on the actual game and challenges faced, etc).

This already looks very interesting and I'd give it a play when you get to the point of throwing up a WebGL early demo.

 

I was looking on how to to implement the original physics.

Then I looked at the decompiled code,which is in C. I understand nothing of it classes names are like 1 to 10. Variables are just x's and y's. Such a frustrating moment

I'm very impressed by the folks at princed.org that has managed to port the game into other modern engines. Someday I really wanted to get back to finish this.

 

Nice to see there's some interest. I might make a thread for this at some point.

 

Actuallly, nope. You have not recreated the original level.

Original Cannon Fodder had greater variation in background sprites, and not just one tile for a ground and one sprite for trees.

Check the first frame of the video and compare to your picture. You're missing up to a dozen tiles.

There's also matter of gameplay.

Basically, this is a rough prototype at best and not the original level.

 

Sometimes I think it would be great if i could throw together a clone of my wife's favorite game (Zelda) for her birthday, but then I remember how I had like 5 free hours to do anything this last week and am still trying to make my first game.

Anyway, I think what Arowx threw together was respectable.

 

How lazy am I allowed to be? Because duplicating a level for an older 2D game would likely be a matter of just importing an image from the web of the entire level, placing down colliders, and assigning scripts to those colliders. By the way here is the level layout for the game I spent entirely too much time playing as a kid.

I'd have to erase the sprites from the image too. Or find one without them.

 

Uh huh.

In other words you haven't got anywhere near close to something resembling the first level of Cannon Fodder. Here are some other things you've missed

• Bullet range
• Enemy AI
• Enemy spawn points
• Buildings
• Level scope
• Character names
• Character promotions
• Inventory and item pickups
• Cliffs
• Water
• Cut scenes
• Kill counter
• World map
• Splitting troops

I do acknowledge that recreating an existing level of an existing retro game in an engine like Unity is fast. But I think you are massively underestimating what was in the first level of Cannon Fodder. To properly do the first level of Cannon Fodder you are looking at a month or so.

Seriously, go play the game again. Level one is a free download. Then we can come back and talk.

 

Well, like most people here I assumed that when you said "make a level of your favorite retro game" you truly meant to recreate a level as in exact same look, sound, gameplay with all the polish, whistles and bells that a game like this has. Of course you can churn out a rough prototype in just a couple of hours, put in programmer art, and call it done.

Many people already said it better than I ever could, but that is not the first level of Cannon Fodder; it's a rough prototype that (at the moment) fails to replicate what made Cannon Fodder great in the first place.

 

Wow great feedback guys, anyone else tempted to give it a whirl in their spare time, amazing what you can do in a few hours with Unity and a MSPaint style program?

And I think this highlights the yawning chasm between what is classed as poor and great or the uncanny valley of game development. Or the gap between what a developer wants to do and what they end up making.

My Feedback Response...

• Bullet range *GP
• Enemy AI *GPC
• Enemy spawn points *OOS
• Buildings *OOS
• Level scope *GPC
• Character names *GP?
• Character promotions *OOS
• Inventory and item pickups *OOS
• Cliffs *GP
• Water *GP?
• Cut scenes *OOS
• Kill counter *GP
• World map *GP?
• Splitting troops *GP?

• Original Cannon Fodder had greater variation in background sprites *GP
• You're missing up to a dozen tiles. *GP
• There's also matter of gameplay. *GPC
• Basically, this is a rough prototype at best and not the original level. *GP?

• it's a rough prototype that (at the moment) fails to replicate what made Cannon Fodder great in the first place *GPC

Feedback Key
*GP - Good point thank you for your great feedback.
*GPC - Good point but could you clarify this with more details.
*GP? - Good point but is it really needed or even used/in the first level. Does not having it detract from the first level?
*OOS - If it's not in the game's first level ( or the level I've made ) it's out of scope.​

 

Just go for it do whatever you want to do and any way that works for you!

 

OK I think you're making the same type of mistake I would make. Are your crosshairs in 3d world space?
I'm betting the originals were 2D sprites, positioned as needed.

Try this:

1. Make them 2D in screenspace.
2. Raycast from front of the ships weapons to a Z plane set to the depth of the nearest enemy (in front of you)*
3. Screencast this point and position the far rectacle there.
4. Screencast the mid point between the ships weapons and this point and put the near rectacle there.

*This should avoid the problems with 3d pointing, you may need to have a minimal Z plane/distance and you might want a proximity lock, e.g. do a SphereOverlay test on the zplane point and if any ships are in that sphere auto lock onto them. Ensuring you get the weapon to lookAt that point before you fire it.

Good Luck and Have Fun.

 

Had a hunch that GP does not stand for "Gold Piece". Anyway.

Basically, what you did is a fun, fast and easy part. Prototypes can be done very quickly, building stuff from scratch is a lot of fun, but ultimately prototype accounts for a small poriton of work (something like 5% of it top), with the rest being polish, polish, polish, iteration, poilsh.... which can ultimately be very tedious. Basically, if prototype takes days, final product will take months. That's the rough idea.

Regarding "would you be willing to give it a try"... giving my art taste I'd need to clone Another World or Mig 29 Fulcrum and not a pixel game. Since I know that I'm capable of doing that, it won't be much fun, besides there are other things I need to work on. Lots and lots of them.

 

I'd definitely give it a go even in Unity because I like these kind of projects. But I've done many tiny games and am now working on... hmm... well a tiny game.... BUT it is one part of a bigger game. Only working about 5 hours per week as well. Pushing trying to do 1 to 2 hours per night was just too much. Caused burnout big time.

I will say @Arowx I like your focus on streamlining and maximizing development speed. I think it is very important. Also your focus on small games. Again another very wise thing I think.

Kind of a shame we are at opposite ends of the spectrum on how we develop because otherwise we could team up hire an artist and build a nice line of games within a year.

 

I can understand that but you need to have fun as the old saying goes "All work and no play, makes jack a dull person".

However I think this could be a good approach for less experienced game developers*, they can skip the hard part of game design and iteration and just work on a game they like and know (or think they do). They get to learn from the experience and any shortcomings in the resulting game are most probably highlighting a gap in their skillset.

Even if you're starting out with a small team of indies it could be worth the time to test your skills out on a quick project like this and it would give your game designer time to get stuck into your new game.

* Watched an interview of one of the 80's game developers (Graftgold) and he said he liked to do ports to new hardware as it gave the team time to learn the new machine.

 

Fun is important when you're just learning to program, but having too much fun during development would mean you'll never finish the project, because you'll have endless distractions.

When you're trying to finish a game you need a goal, focus and willpower instead.

 

13 Hours to build a level of a retro game in Unity? I challenge you to actually attempt this and report back results in 13 hours time.

 

6 Hrs -> https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/h...rite-retro-game-in-unity.454165/#post-2943432

Feedback -> https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/h...rite-retro-game-in-unity.454165/#post-2943867

I'm looking at a remake/demake (e.g. 8 bit/low poly version of modern classic game) as way to test your skills and because you have the original as a reference a good way to analyse your own weaknesses. Which is hard to do when you're working on your own 'dream' project.

Or goal driven long term development is a totally separate skill set from using retro games to self test your skills.

 

The problem here is that analyzing your own weaknesses while working on something else does not bring you any closer to completion of your "dream" or non-dream project, and may ultimately be just one more distraction. Which brings us back to the point of having too much fun. Getting something done usually requires completion of some unfun tasks as well.

 

More importantly, if your weaknesses are lack of creativity and/or problem solving. The whole exercise in just one of avoidance.

 

This is a great thread. I love seeing people's work and hearing the challenges.

@ikazrima - prince of persia is an amazing game.

I would put money down that Prince of Persia was the core inspiration for Assassins Creed. The way Prince of Persia did animation was just sooo much better than anything else at the time. It was really years ahead of it's time.

@Blacklight - I love that you took so much care in nailing the 'feel'. It really gives you some respect for older games when you try to recreate something like that and see how hard it is to recreate on the same level.

I think the thing is - quality isn't a linear cost. As you raise the quality bar - the cost in time goes up at an exponential rate. That's why there's a huge gap between gamejam or prototype games and complete, polished games.

That cost isn't just art and it isn't just code, the further you reach the better everything needs to be.

 

I went and played 'A Sensible Initiantion' which is the first level of Cannon Fodder. It contained all of the things I had on the list.

So while you are free to make whatever you want, you have cut down the slope quite dramatically from the first level of Cannon Fodder. Be honest with yourself as to what you've made, and what you are trying to make.

 

Well I based my remake off the youtube video I linked to in the post above.

• Enemy spawn points *OOS - There are only two enemies and no spawn buildings in level 1
• Buildings *OOS - See above.
• Character promotions *OOS - It's an inter/post level feature.
• Inventory and item pickups *OOS - In crates which are do not appear in the reference video I used, please disprove.
• Cut scenes *OOS - It's an inter/post level feature.

Or from a certain point of view (above linked video).

 

One important thing to keep in mind is @Arowx has used only about 1/4 of his estimated time. He still has about 15 hours remaining. He should be able to do a lot of the things mentioned in that amount of time. 15 hours is nearly 2 full workdays or about 3 weeks of game dev for me at current pace. Basically it's a lot of time (if not focused on presentation concerns).

 

Okay, just watched the video. Apparently there were multiple different versions of 'A sensible initiation'. In my version it's a ice level. There are a handful of buildings, cliffs, grenades and so on. Which comes in at level three in other versions.

That would explain the differences in our opinions, apparently we were both playing very different first levels. Your prototype is pretty close to the first level you were working from.

 

Nope, they are 2D sprites on the canvas. I'm screencasting them to 2 points in front of the player (currently 30 and 15 units).

I see two problems with your solution:

• The reticle is going to be jumping all over the place as enemies are killed or move to different positions, and if you try to smooth the transitions there's going to be a lot of times where it's not accurate at all.
  
• It's only going to be accurate against one enemy (or small group) at a time.

I've actually sort of solved the issue with a different (and simpler method). I raycast from the camera to the reticle position and instead of just shooting the projectile forward, use the ray to aim. Instant accuracy at all ranges. There are some minor issues with this method but they aren't really noticeable. Turns out I just needed to treat it like any other shooter game I've made.

Thanks for the suggestion, though!