I think I'm being robbed

Hi there

I have contacted with a unity developer to develop a game.
He produced the following output after claiming it took him 40+ hours.

http://recordit.co/yJa8PDTSvQ

Is it reasonable?
How many hours you need to develop such functionality?

Kindly help

 

I can do that in about an hour....

 

Does the lobby work? I.e if you connect a second client does it show 2/4 players?

If so, they may have been learning how to create a working lobby for the first time.

But yeah, I would estimate absolute maximum 12 hours to get the lobby working.

If they’ve done it before, just a couple hours work.

 

40+ hours sounds like he started the clock, installed Unity for the first time, browsed some tutorials about UI and networking, submitted the work and multiplied the clock time by 2-4 times?

 

How much are you paying him per hour? You can dispute it if you hired him through a freelance network.

 

We don't have enough information:

• do both parties understand that 40 hours means 40 actual hours logged over, presumably a week, or do both parties have different ideas such as 40 hours = 2 days? What is "hours"?

• produced the following output means? did he do the art? the buttons? the design? the animation? is it native? is it within unity? what invisible functionality does the gif not show? what are the project parameters for 40 hours?

Without clear data this a thread that is meaningless. The questions above seem obvious to assume but assumptions + people not used to contract work = disaster.

 

Depends on the server network, is it Peer to Peer (PtP) or Dedicated Server (DS) as PtP is built into Unity and DS needs external development of a backend system.

 

It doesn't look like 40 hours. But a lot depends on what is happening underneath. If its just the UI that's shown, then the programming could be done in an hour (less if you already had visual studio and unity open). If the matchmaking actually works, then you can add on another few hours. If they developed the entire logo (seems unlikely, they would have used better placeholder buttons in that case), then the time could come up considerably higher.

Its typically not worth trying to contest. If you don't think its worth what you paid move on to using a different contractor in future.

 

First, what @hippocoder and @Kiwasi said. Particularly that a picture doesn't show the extent of the work done. Is that a GUI mockup, or is the back end functionality actually in place? One of many questions we've no answer to from a GIF.

Second...

... this is also important. If you've opted for the cheapest option then expect to get someone inexperienced, in which case they could have genuinely spent 40 hours on that stuff (Edit: to clarify, by "that stuff" I mean only what we explicitly see in the GIF), and the results may still be rough / insecure / buggy / difficult to maintain.

We occasionally see threads around here where people get cheap labour and then then complain about how terrible contractors are, when they weren't willing to pay rates high enough to get someone with experience in the first place.

 

I agree, this is a bad question.

We don't know how much work was done behind the 'scenes'. I also call bullshit on everyone saying this would take them an hour, I would like to see you guys record in real time this taking an hour (With no prep time). I would consider this a days work without backend\underlying code and a weeks work with.

 

I think they're just making minimalist assumptions about what's going on.

If I were practiced at putting this kind of UI together and already had a framework for handling the fiddly bits then I'm pretty sure I could mock up what's seen here in the vicinity of an hour. If it has to work, definitely not. (Though again, with an appropriate framework if I was familiar with it then maybe? There's another huge set of assumptions there about how much of the work is done from scratch and how much was pre-existing.)

 

I'm not sure what's more ridiculous, the idea that someone would take 40 hours to make a couple of UI screens, or the idea that showing a gif of a software product is a way to show the full extent of its features and functionality.

You obviously don't know what you asked for, or you would have explained what it was (or what it should have been) rather than calling it 'the following output'. So I would suggest going back to the beginning and making a list of all the things that you expected from your freelancer, and a ballpark range of how much you expect each of these to cost, and posting them up here so people who actually know what these things entail can explain how much it usually costs.

 

I just think they are underestimating how quickly time passes, an hour is enough time to spin a project up (create it, set it up with source control, start documentation and read some of the design to start thinking implementation).

 

You're making a bunch of assumptions of your own, there. Not everyone works with professional levels of rigour.

And your list is far from minimalist. If what we've seeing is interpreted as a mockup then nothing in that list past creating the project matters. Those people were responding only based on what's shown in the animation, which doesn't demonstrate version control, documentation, or any documented design on either side of the project.

 

What do you mean by "start documentation"?

 

I know I am making assumptions, but my point is:

No-one could re-create this UI in an hour as specified in that gif. If you can, please show me how you do it. Even if it's the bare minimum.

Just a simple project readme, determine who is the contact for the project and any information about getting started (Links to design doc \ mockups or anything that would need referencing when developing the project). Basic administration for client projects. I would bill all of this to the client as it's required to ensure the health of the project is maintained.

 

I don't think it's worth making any assumptions one way or the other until the OP clarifies what the job was all about. In fact this kind of thread is pointless already because obviously the job failed catastrophically at the contract/design stage.

Unless the OP produces something showing otherwise, I think the only lesson or useful point to make is to make sure you know what you're asking for, set out all the details in a contract with an estimate of the number of hours it would take, and preferably use milestones. Otherwise you'll likely just get a bag of trinkets and a story about how much it's worth.

 

Billing by the hour requires mutual trust between two parties, or a time card.

 

Really? There is nothing special here. Literally just a bunch of buttons and a chat box. Check out my YouTube channel for instructions on how to make everything that is here. And once you've made something once, its a very easy job to just drop it into a new project.

I occasionally do mock ups of UI as a freelancer. Its a cheap way to gauge interest in an app. I could easily create everything visible in the gif in an hour (assuming I was given the loading graphics).

Really depends on what the client wants. Source control, documentation and design can all be skipped for a UI mock up. I generally don't bother with any of this stuff with minor jobs.

 

Of if you've done it a lot (hence my initially mentioning being practised) then it's pretty darn quick to spit the same stuff out again with minor variations. It almost comes down to how quickly you can click the buttons.

 

I agree, there is nothing special here, but there is more than just that and I think you must not have watched the same gif I watched. There is a form of navigation stack (With overlays) and transition animations along with all the UI. I agree with code re-use though, I use a custom package manager for mine.

I do not think you can do this in an hour without the prep\script you do in tutorials. I am happy to be proven wrong though.

 

I'm sure HLAPI with Unet is pretty close to Photon, so I'll go ahead and say this. (assuming they are using HLAPI Unet).
In Photon, I can have a basic main menu, lobby, syncing players, entire basic game system that does points and change levels, basic health systems, shooting etc in the matter of a couple of hours. More like prototype stuff, but the point is, 40 hours? That's kind of a long time - unless they are new at it, and then it makes sense.

I'm only so fast with photon because I've used it so many times, that comes with experience.

But at the end of the day, you get what you pay for and how much you research into people before offering them work.

 

The thing is, this is all fairly standard stuff. I do a lot of it. The solutions are well known. Its not like I would be inventing anything new.

An hour might be overestimating my abilities. But not by much. Even if it takes two or three hours, its still considerably less than forty hours.

 

Don't get me wrong, I have done much more complex UI and navigation\animations including multiple applications with content loaded from a CMS (I'm working on another right now). I'm not saying it isn't standard, it still takes time to assemble all of the parts even if you have them.

Well, what we see is less than 40 hours, but definitely more than 1 and keeping in mind there could be more than we know underlying in the gif (Like backend etc) I can see it easily taking a week.

 

I'm such a perfectionist about button placement that I'd bill four hours for that alone
(Pro-tip: Don't hire me to design your GUIs!)

I actually make JSON backends quicker than some GUIs :/

 

What we've been presented with is a splash screen followed by the option to choose the form of multiplayer you want followed by a limited form of lobby. Practically every multiplayer game has functionality of this sort so an experienced developer will likely have a premade starting point.

An inexperienced developer may not have it but even then there is one on the Asset Store for free.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/network-lobby-41836

 

While I strongly suspect that there are people who could indeed do it in under an hour, I think that's beside the point?

 

Why did you quote me for this, I agree with everything here. Even with a pre made start you will need a lot of tweaking to match the gif 1:1 though.

 

I'll echo that if there's no server/multiplayer backend, everything (except perhaps the "hit or quit" symbol) seems trivially simple and almost certainly did not take 40 hours. Heck, I consider myself quite poor at Unity and literally everything but the "chat room" bit and the animations looks like the effort of 1, maaaaaybe 2 hours at most (and I'm really being generous there). I mean it's literally a bunch of panels and buttons moving between them.

 

I'm quoting you largely because of your belief that it would take more than an hour to go from a pre-made start to what is being presented in the GIF. There simply isn't enough shown in that prototype to justify the need for a "lot of tweaking". If the person he hired has a template then the entire thing could have been done in an hour.

 

I strongly disagree with you. That would depend on the template. Potentially his template was exactly as presented and he only added the splash-screen, making it only a 10 minute job! Or maybe his template needed a complete re-layout and change of transitions to correctly match the gif 1:1 making it a two or three hour job.

Feel free to prove yourself right by starting from your pre-made multiplayer lobby.

 

How are you disagreeing? We're saying it could have been done in one hour. Just because it might not have doesn't change the fact we could have done it in one hour.

 

Feel free to prove that. I would love to see the hacky solution you come up with.

I find a lot of amateur developers mis-represent how long it takes them to do things and believe it's happening a lot in this thread.

 

See here is the problem I have with your entire argument. You're saying it has to look exactly like the original developer presented it but we don't know if that's the way the OP wanted it to look like. We're simply being shown a demonstration video and being asked if this is reasonable. Some of us feel it isn't.

 

First it will take too long because of deliverables neither mentioned nor shown. Then it'll take too long because it has to be a 1:1 match to a spec that didn't originally exist... for a mockup / prototype. Now even if we could do it using pre-existing stuff or a framework it'd necessarily be "hacky"?

 

No, you guys or some guys are saying they can reproduce the video in one hour (Well, the build showcased in the video not just the video ). I don't think that's feasible, especially at that capacity for the whole project (If there is more).

Yes, based on the video alone and 40+ hours, that isn't reasonable I agree. Some people added on it would take them an hour which I think is a bit much.

I'm sorry but the gif is our only spec we can go against. If someone said to me they could reproduce the work done in the gif in one hour, I would expect all button positions to be the same, all animations to match, all timing to match and all layouts to match. If any don't match, it's not the same work.

 

No, the question was how many hours "to develop such functionality". The question was never about visually matching anything.

Edit: Also note that you're nitpicking specifics that aren't there. The claims were "about an hour" (ie: a rough estimate) and for the programming to be done in an hour (ie: not the whole job). Then you jumped in saying it was "bullshit" and repeatedly requesting that people prove otherwise. It's pretty odd.

Are you the contractor in question, by any chance?

 

Okay? Is the UI not apart of the games functionality in your opinion? I would disagree with that and would love to see your reasoning why that should be ignored.

 

Yes, the functionality of the UI is an important part of the game. What you're arguing about is the layout of the UI. But we haven't been asked anything about the layout nor do we know if this is the layout requested by the OP or simply one the freelancer presented.

 

Oh yes I see what you are trying to say, it's just we are looking at this functionality of the entire 'output' as the OP put it. The animations and layout are apart of the functionality IMO because without that there is literally nothing really there...

 

On the other hand my opinion is that they are not an important part of the prototype unless I'm told they are.

 

That's a good point, but the OP didn't specify if it's a prototype so it's also kind of irrelevant to think that way.

 

Right, but he didn't specify that it wasn't either. My conclusion that it's a prototype was reached based on the appearance of the demo. We're being presented with a reasonably good splash screen only to suddenly see a UI that is clearly using very basic graphics. Everything about the video screams "early milestone".

 

@nathan_epc @angrypenguin

Maybe you guys just have a different view on what is being done. For example nathan_epc mentions a screen stack, custom animations, etc., which suggests you are doing this 'the right way'. I tend to agree that doing that would take much more than an hour.

But am I allowed to use my existing libraries, I already have a screen stack library (which also handles transition, sounds, modals, etc):

​

I think with that in place I could get pretty close to an hour (for the UI).

But what if this guy built a UI system which handles the screen stack, transitions, modals, etc, in a nice way: that could easily run to 40 hours. Not to mention the actual underlying/backend systems. If this is driven by a real backend you could easily add another 40 hours. Does it have nice testing/stubbing framework. Add another 20.

As @hippocoder and others have already said it depends heavily on what was actually done and the gif doesn't tell us that.

 

Well, I thought my view was clear in that we don't know what's been done? I was one of "and others".

The rest of your post is pretty much my point exactly. If it is just a GUI mockup (because it clearly isn't final...) and you have the right tools, sure it can be done in "about an hour", which is what "bullshit" was being called on.

 

The way this thread is going is pointless. It reminds me of this thread, where everybody was ready to judge a freelancer based on some minimal evidence that they'd overcharged (before the OP presented a clearer picture).

I tend to think that if you're basically accusing someone of robbing you, you have to make a very clear point or don't do it to begin with. I haven't seen any evidence that the OP even knew what the freelancer was supposed to do for them. Also, saying "am I being robbed?" and presenting a gif? Well, nobody is required by law to charge a fair price for anything, it's up to you to figure out what a good price is and go shopping. Just because you're not a coder doesn't remove your responsibility to determine a good price range and figure out some way to make sure that the freelancer sticks to it.

Funny how whenever I see discussions about how much to charge as a freelancer, I see $100-$150/hour bandied around like it's the norm, and then people are ready to judge someone for overcharging when it hasn't even been specified how much they charged per hour - maybe they were charging $5/hour and the whole thing turned out so cheap that it's a joke.

I think that until it's been proven otherwise, I would assume that the freelancer did nothing wrong whatsoever, and the OP simply failed to set any kind of standard as to what was expected from the job. There's nothing wrong with bringing bad practices to light but you have to do it in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination, and makes it clear that the result deviated significantly from some pre-determined contract specifications.

 

Because I am bored and on vacation:

36 mins from empty project to video recording. Simple stack (arrays) for panels/modals, stubbed server calls (with faked responses), no 3rd party tools/assets, no error handling, no localization, nothing dynamically constructed (basic editor wiring). Doesn't do anything other than what was shown in video above. No point really, just a bit of fun.

 

Yeah but yours would probably cost twice as much as a simple slave doing 40 hours because you ain't cheap

 

The thing is we are looking at this as 40 hours to produce the content in the video what about the time to 'talk' with the client agree what they want draft out design documents and a project schedule?

Also is this the first deliverable of were there earlier prototypes to feel out what the client needs?

 

Perhaps it's a cunning ruse and it's the OP's work and he's figuring if he can charge 40 hours work. /intrigue