How much to "program" this game?

Hello
I hope its in the right section. We have an unfinished adventure game made on old engine (wont name it), and we will be probably porting it to unity. Its a standard 2.5 D point and click adventure game with around 65 main scenes. Point and click adventure is Syberia for example, i would like to ask, how much time would it take for a programmer (lets say "semi skilled or a "pro" in unity, not a begginer) to script/program the whole game together, when everything else except the code is done. That means graphics etc. sound/music the script, everything is done, we need only a programmer to put it together on unity, standard 2.5 D point and click adventure for windows, 2D pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters... around 65 main scenes.

How long would it take a semi or pro programmer in unity to finish the game ("code it"), if he worked 8 hours a day?

 

Impossible to say because you left out a lot of details,

 

I doubt that can be told without knowing all the things you would like to have implemented. Even if you made a list, it will still be difficult to estimate.

 

Come on guys, give me at some rough estimate, im sure you played some classic point and click adventure, if not, check it here for example:
1)

2)

There would be around 15 NPCs+main characters, all animations would be done and ready outside unity.

There would be some rendered videos which you would have to implement, ingame and main menu, voice acting feature, game would be avaiable in few languages, player would have the ability to change this in menu. The characters are 3D and are moving on pre rendered 2D backgrounds using simplified "hidden" 3D geometry for moving around the scenes, and also for catching the characters shadow. The game has also a lot of sounds and music. There would be also several scripted events during which you wouldnt control the characters, but instead you would be watching a scripted ingame narative scene.

This should be enough for you to give me a rought estimate for a semi/pro unity programmer working 8 hours a day...
If not, please let me know which additional information should i provide to get at leats some rough estimation, thank you.

 

Estimation is one of the hardest parts of my job. Seriously, there are so many factors in play here. Some people could get something up and working in a week. More likely is in the months time range. Also, getting art and sound assets is a really hard thing to do and takes a lot of coordination with a team. (EDIT: Just saw you already have all this.)

So I'll say somewhere between a month to two years, depending on the scope, scale, and experience of everyone involved.

Entire books have been written on estimation. People pay thousands of dollars to go to seminars to figure project management out. Again, estimation is one of the *hardest* things to do right. If you have access to the entire project then experience should give you some estimate.

You know more about the state of your project and the speed of your team members than any of us do.

 

Garth Smith: This is terrible, i hate replies like yours , i read it many times mainly from programmers . Just give me a number, if you are experienced programmer you should be able to give some number, as i said, many, practically all art and music/sounds is done, the small part that isnt will be done before the coding beggins...
If it is still too hard for someone to grasp, than go with this:

Take it all THEORETICALLY, as a "mind experiment".

-The whole project IS DONE EXCEPT THE PROGRAMM/CODE... We only need the programmer to put all the "pieces" (graphics, sounds, music etc.) together....

With this, and the description above, please please please, will someone be able to give me an rough estimation?

 

I think Garth Smith gave an excellent answer, you wanted an estimate and he gave it to you backed up with (imho) valid arguments. It just depends on too many things to give a more accurate estimate.

 

Garth gave a pretty good answer. Estimation is usually called guesstimation for a reason when it comes to programming. The more easily guessed parts are the parts of the system you know you need, but the unknowns are related to the time taken to get the source art into the engine and looking good. Putting the pieces together is in fact the greatest unknown

There is a great adventure kit on the asset store which would be a perfect fit for this project, so it would really be a matter of learning to use that. Which is probably going to take a week or two before you figure out a) if it's a sufficient adventure engine for your purposes, and b) how long it's probably going to take you to build a game in it.

 

"That means graphics etc. sound/music the script, everything is done, we need only a programmer to put it together on unity, "

1 programmer who has to do all the game-play, ui, audio programming, scripted events, conversations, save/load, debugging, tools development and deployment to target.

Minimum of 8 months as long as everything is detailed ahead of time, doesn't change and absolutely nothing goes wrong (which absolutely never happens).

Jason
PS Garth nailed it

 

@FrederickN Let me tell you a story. It was earlier in my career, when I was a lead programmer on a project. The project got approved, but I gave bad estimates causing us to attempt way too much in way too little time. I think this is something a lot of professional programmers can relate too. Promising the world at the beginning of a project then coming to the realization that I bit off more than I can chew.

The project ended up taking three times longer than we expected. That cost money which led to laying off a couple of people. I don't think *anyone* likes laying people off. Now... my bad estimates weren't the only thing that harmed the project but that experience motivated me to start studying project management.

If I'm running a project and getting estimates for it from random people on a forum on the internet, I'm not going to remotely consider that a good estimate. Hell, I don't even take the estimates from my own team at face value but as just a data point

 

Theoretically this doesn't make any sense, since its practically mandatory to work in parallel with the other disciplines... But if you want a ballpark idea, then just assume the "programming" will take 3x the time it took to complete the rest of the game.

I say that lightly, because "programming" here is ambiguously overlapping other disciplines, like.. All of them.

Even then, that estimate is absurd and has no real value whatsoever, considering the information at hand....

 

Sounds about right, not including testing/feedback/bugfixes

 

There are a lot of factors which affect the production time. It could be your budget, target platform, and most importantly - your skills and motivation.

 

Do people outside the programming discipline think it's really easy or something? As said, it's impossible to give an accurate estimate.

Give us details such as; navigation system, UI, main gameplay features...if you list everything you expect to have in the final version of the game under those such headings then an estimate will be a lot easier and a lot more accurate. But it still will probably end up being about 1.5/2x longer than that, Unless you're extremely lucky.

 

The pessimistic rule of thumb is to double the number and move to the next bigger time unit. One day = two weeks, one week = two months, and so on

 

This is a difficult one. I think by the way the conversation has gone thus far, it's difficult now to retrieve the conversation and make a rapport which would enable a developer to understand the ins and outs of it, eg design expectations, workflow dependencies, features/gameplay. Understanding those things would allow someone to create a basic timeline, based on the actual (reasonably) predictable workload, minimised harder to predict workload (holes), and the dependencies from the client that might halt or slow the dev's workflow. Even with ALL the assets being available, unless you have a clear fully written living game design document (or show us the exact game you want made) and a game designer to tickbox the choreography as it progresses, it'll be difficult to predict. Meaning a dependancy on the dev's workflow. In short, the dev needs a more intimate understanding of the job to do it.

I mean there's two sides to the coin. Yes, it's difficult to give clean estimations, but then again, it's horrible for project managers to deal with people saying 'twice the length of half the time'. Estimations need to be made, but they're drastically unreliable without more intimate knowledge.

I'd say somewhere between 6 months to 2 years. Towards the higher end if there's dependencies on the dev's workflow and hoops they have to jump through from designers choreographing your work, or the game having particularly difficult aspects that fit the previous engine, but must be re-planned for Unity. And, of course what platform it's being developed for. AND any other mitigating factors that haven't even been thought of yet or seen. There'll be those too.

 

I may not have as much experience as some people, ("come on, I'm only 17!" ) But judging by your first post, you're saying to me that you have just about everything (I am looking at the assets built, such as models, environments, cut-scenes, etc.) And all you need to do is sort of "stitch" everything together. (Let's also say that "stitching" is the scripts used to control all aspects of your game)

That leaves out the last thing you guys need to do to fully port your game to Unity: Programming.
This... has a lot of factors, as others have said.

But, if your coding team is really good at producing something basic (or even a bit complex!) in about 4 hours of coding, (I know someone who coded the card game Black Jack in Unity for that short time, including GUI and other things) then porting could take a really short time. Another factor is not only the skill of your coding team, but the debugging/optimizing skills they have as well, as this will impact the whole project positively if those last two are done right.

That leaves out the last critical component: motivation. without that, everything will either take forever, or fall apart quickly. I know: a lack of motivation lead to me ending up rebooting a project as something else, as the end result wasn't exactly appealing...

 

I wrote blackjack in a C++ console application complete with ascii card graphics in uni in about 5 hours. So 4 hours within a game engine isn't that impressive. It's one of the simplest card games to make. He has all assets done except for the actual game code. So basically, he has pretty pictures and sound. It's not as simple as "stitching" them together, he has to make the actual game.

 

Well, I wasn't literally saying it was that easy, just that it requires a bit of forethought before leaping forward. But didn't he say that they were using a different game engine beforehand? that means this guy must have already done some programming on the game before considering unity, so at least there's a bit of pre-done code to look at, and implement in Unity. (Again, I did this when making a port of a game I had been making in gameMaker. since I had done some coding already, implementing it in unity made it a lot easier)

 

BTW (i will reply in full length later on), is here any forum member that works on such adventure game? More or less standard point and click? I know there are few adventure games that run on UNITY and are under development, but im not sure if the team members are a member forums.... Dont you know someone like that here on forum?

 

Since you already have the content, just drop it into Adventure Creator! Or at least ask Chris how long it took him to develop it. He's been constantly improving Adventure Creator for at least a year, and he introduced the product on the Asset Store in a very complete shape, so maybe 18 months to replicate what it does.