Looking for a cost estimate. How much would it cost to make this?

Pretty much, yes. Some in shorter time, some longer, but on average every two years.

 

Instead of hiring people, you should have saved up the money. If you had maintained the full $3,000 per month during those four years you would have had $144,000.

First thing I would have done is hire someone to assist with expanding upon that meager design document and any of the game's mechanics. Regardless of whether or not it is simply detailing the game engine, they could have assisted with finding any potential flaws or obstacles.

With the remaining funds I would have hired someone to develop the game to the initial launch state.

If your current method is not bearing results it may be time to consider a different one.

 

It took you 6 months of learning before landing a job that made you $20k?

How many hours did you studied per day?

I just got these jobs recently, I've been at my main one since June, my 2nd since September and I just go aproved for Uber this past week.

It's not the method, it's the quality of contractor, something i am on the way of rectifying.

 

This is really worth repeating.

You mentioned that you're working 3 jobs so you can put the money into game dev. On one hand, it makes sense that you realised the costs involved and are trying to raise capital to invest into your dream - the cash has to come from somewhere. On the other hand, there's a tipping point somewhere where the cash becomes less important than time. If you had less cash to put into your game, but more time, could you get stronger results?

The "trickle time" question is an important one. On the side of a professional, full-time job as a real-time 3D software programmer (ie: with skills directly relevant to game dev), my first published game took me four years of on-and-off work (mostly off at the start, mostly on at the end). You've spent the same four years so far. You said you'll do what you're doing if it takes 10 years to get it done. That's admirable, but is it practical? If you want to make games, then do you really want your first one to be 15 years in the making? Over your lifetime that means you can expect to make, what, 5 or 6 games if you're lucky?

If you dropped one of the jobs and instead put that time into your game, what gains would that make? Is cash really your bottleneck here?

For $3000 a month you should definitely be able to get someone to help you out. Nowhere near full time, of course, but a few days a month from a moderately experienced coder could get you a long way here. Someone trying to make ends meet as they develop their own game or earn money to spend on their own development might be an ideal match for you, here.

 

It wasn't a job that made the money, it was the first thing I programmed. A tool for an existing game. I sold the tool myself from my web site and made money with it.

I didn't really study programming to make it, I just jumped in the deep end and started swimming.

 

That's good advise.

I'm reluctant to quit one of my jobs because i know for sure that time spent there will produce money, but i am not sure if my games will to make up for the time spent. The only thing i need is a quality developer, as you described. Everyone else is on board; artist, musician and playtesters.

...and by swimming you mean programming for clients?

 

By "jumping in the deep end and swimming" I mean I didn't give it a whole lot of thought, I didn't study programming ahead of time, I didn't try to hold on to several jobs while I saved the money to work on "what I really wanted to do", I didn't look to see if there was a branch to grab before I jumped off the cliff, I just did it.

Your idea of saving money to make games is good in theory, but it ignores the fact that you won't know anything about the game business if you continue to stay out of it.

 

One big problem this can lead to is the potential to hire someone who gave a time frame and cost estimate that was not realistic. The OP has already encountered a situation like this with a contractor who is now having to be replaced.

When you go to take an interview for a potential job it is pretty much a given that you will be interviewed at least partially by someone who is in the field. If you're applying for a programming position, it will be a programmer. If an artist, you will be interviewed by an artist from the team.

Having at least some understanding of these fields, even if you aren't capable of professionally doing them yourself, can help you to determine if someone is trying to take advantage of you.

 

[/QUOTE]
I think you need more than that. Are you aware of the Four Stages of Competence? You don't know what knowledge gaps you have, and are currently trying to overcome that purely by throwing money at the problem.

While I wish that more starting game developers had the willpower, work ethic and financial forethought you've displayed, your real issue here is that you don't yet understand game development. Until you rectify that, how are you going to know where to spend the cash you're working so darn hard to bring in? Sure you could hire in this experience too, but that just eats away at even more of the money.

And then, lets say you do successfully make your game by persisting as you are...

This has many levels of impact on both your current and future projects. How do you know who to hire, and who's gaining experience, skills and knowledge from your current project to take onto their next?

 

Roughly four years ago an inspired young developer wrote out in his manifesto (for which, he received nearly $5000 in funding

It is very commendable that he still has the will and dedication to fulfill his vision. It is extremely unfortunate that he is ignoring the advice of those who *have* had vision and *have* succeeded.

Your storyboards are simplistic in the extreme. I do more detailed mock ups in 2min sketches of an idea. And I'm a programmer with appalling artistic skill. More importantly, I undertake these methods for a reason.

So make a decision, either I'm wrong - more detailed storyboards won't help you and I'm sorry for wasting your time - or maybe I have an idea of what I'm talking about. The best bit is you don't even have to trust me!!!

Instead run a test, take your current storyboards/GDD to some strangers and get them to do nothing more than play a game. Don't say a thing, don't show them what to do, don't even tell them it's a board game.

 

That seems very risky. Did you just so happen to stumble upon the $20k gig 6 months after you started?

The only reason he is being replaced is because of his failure to communicate. I understand delays and i tolerate them just as long as i am kept in the loop and that they are not too far gone to absurd proportions. I have never let someone go because they were taking too long.

Yeah, I'm going to need to hire a consultant for sure.

How much game development do i need to understand and how long would it take?

In games, i always play to my strengths. I always roll for stats before i pick my class and race. I'm not sure how good of a wizard i can be, but i know i can be a great fighter.

 

Are you just not reading what I write or... ? How else can I phrase it? It wasn't a $20k gig. It wasn't a job. It wasn't a contract. It wasn't an inheritance, it wasn't.... erk.

I made a program. I SOLD the program to users. I made money.

You're focusing on that one tiny part of a whole, and missing the big picture.

 

Ok, is that typical for anyone that starts studying/applying programming 6 months in? How many hours a day did you dedicate to programming in those 6 months?

 

How can I answer that in a way that will be useful to you? There's no standardized metric for how much of a thing you understand.

Really, you just have to make games. Complete ones. That's why it's such common advice to start trivially small and work your way up.

 

Nothing is typical. See, here now you're asking about how many hours a day it took, how this and that, and what you're NOT doing is just doing it, which is the whole point I was trying to make. You can sit around all day figuring out how to do something, or you can do it.

 

living the dream

 

Hah! Totally. I guess it's better to live the dream than dream the life.

Yeah that was lame. I said it anyway.

 

I believe in planning as much as possible, especially when the stakes are high.

How much time do you spend making games for yourself vs for clients on a daily basis?

 

How can you expect someone to produce the results you desire if you don't give them appropriate specifications?

Your game design document tells another story.

 

How is that going to help you? You're not me. You just want to talk about it instead of doing it. I get that. It's scary. There are dreamers and there are doers. And right now, I'm still working (2:00AM) so I'll be off. I don't suppose you've downloaded Unity yet and started learning how to use it. Might want to try that instead of sitting in here talking about it.

 

Adding to this, I've got a friend who is almost finished with a game design course at his university. He's mentioned how the course is structured a few times in the past. They essentially have each person taking the course take part in each step of the process of building games.

They have them learn, even if they aren't particularly good at it, the processes involved in making artwork, in programming, in developing a game, in leading a team, etc.

By the time someone has completed the course they will have made several simple games using game design documents that are either given to them or told to make themselves.

They do this because experience is important. Without it you can be told something is important but won't fully understand why or how to work around obstacles it introduces until you've had to do it yourself.

 

It's not a game design document. It's a game engine design document. It's one of the first things it says on the document itself. The document is not to make the game, but for a tool I need to make the game.

I thought I made that clear already.

Already done that ages ago and it didn't imbue me with the skills I need to do the game I want. I wish I had time to sit there and do that without gambling my future away.

 

Your document is not specifying a tool. It is specifying, albeit in a very limited and brief fashion, a game. It is pretty obvious it is describing a game too when the first entry is "What kind of game is Tribal Pride?".

You are gambling your future away. You have been working three jobs, with the money primarily going into a team, which has produced little to no meaningful results. You even admitted in an earlier post that you aren't certain your games will make up for the time invested.

Game design is going to involve a gamble to some degree. Big companies minimize this by repeatedly sticking to designs that have proven themselves successful. They also know when it is time to cut their losses. Plenty of games in the past have been killed off because things were not going well.

Not that I am encouraging you to quit, but I think you need to evaluate how you are handling things and if there is still a chance for this entire process to actually produce results.

 

If I'm reading this all correctly, all you want is:

A board, with pieces that can be moved by each player. Each play can only move their own pieces, and they can move them any way they want, even if they're contrary to the rules. Players will carry out the rules on their own. The rules don't need to be known because no programming will be done for them.

An inventory. It will consist of an initial set of pieces and pieces that they gain later. No mention has been made to whether or not they'll be able to view the contents of this inventory, or the statistics for each piece in the inventory.

A daily login system. This will give the player 1 piece randomly from the list of possible pieces.

A credit system. This trades real money for in-game credits.

A trade system. Users can trade anything or nothing. Cost (in credits) is determined by the total value being traded. It is not stated who will pay for the trade.

A game-turn system. This will be asynchronous and each turn will continue when both players have entered their move. Then each player will be shown the moves made. Showing the moves made is potentially ugly due to the fact that the rules are not programmed in and every slight movement might be significant to the gameplay. There must also be a way for a game to be marked as finished.

A match-making system. This could be from a list of friends or random opponents. There needs to be a way to initiate a request, and to accept or deny a request.

An in-progress game list. And a way to view an in-progress game to make the next move.

No mention was made of a chat system during gameplay.

The game has to work via Facebook.

What started out sounding like a very simple system got very complicated very quickly, largely due to things like the real-money credits and trading system. If I were making this, my first prototype would be much simpler:

I'd drop the ability to view the inventory outside of combat.

I'd drop the trade system, and thus the real money system.

I'd drop the daily login system.

I'd drop the visual indication of what moves were made.

I'd make the match-making system work on a username basis, forcing players to type the username that they want to challenge.

After that, the game would be a lot simpler and those dropped features could be added on. For the remaining features, I'd implement them in this order: Match-request by username. Match deny or accept, along with response to the requester. Base inventory. Game board with draggable pieces. Turn End button. Game End button. Popup for pieces that give their information.

That would give you the bare bones system you need to get started with the game. It would be relatively easy to give you access to the data files that reference any art and text for the pieces.

My gut tells me I could have that working in 2 weeks. My gut usually lies to me and it'd probably be more like 4-8 weeks if everything went well. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-15k. Part of that is because I'm not familiar enough with writing games for Facebook and I suspect there will be some initial issue of getting a server set up for me to deploy to, since I don't plan to foot the cost of it myself. I also suspect there would be a lot of changes that required me to rework things substantially each time we discussed it, further driving the estimate up.

And then all the dropped features would be on top of that.

That's the estimate you were asking for. I don't work on commission, so it might not be a very useful estimate, but there it is.

 

Just read this incredibly long thread. Glad that someone finally focused on actually responding to his request for a quote. If you do all that you specified he would certainly be much further along than he has progressed in the past 4 years.

 

I gave him a quote in my first post in the thread. He didn't respond so I removed that section from my post. He's asking for quotes, some people have given them, and he is ignoring them.

I don't think he really wants quotes, I mean, he already got them in the job section two years ago for this very same project. His budget then was $2000. He posted it again in 2013 and got some good advice here. I suspect he's just wasting time in order to avoid doing what he know he needs to do. Just my thoughts.

 

That's weird, because lately I feel like I'm swimming in code.

 

Whoa!!! I say this and people start talking about rounding up the mods.... you go

 

There is at least one other quote within this thread. Not to mention multiple quotes from the threads Ony has linked. I think wccrawford's is the most detailed to date though.

I do think he wants one, but I think he wants it to be very low as evidenced by a post slightly into the thread.

 

Reality is a mother... ehrm. I saw this turning into a b.s. three ring circus sideshow from the very start and whooeee!

 

Am I the only one who sees where stuff is headed...? Lol.

 

I had been wondering where you disappeared to.

 

I said at the very beginning that I grab some popcorn so I could watch everything crazy go down. I simply lack the sort of time that is necessary to engage in this sort of tomfoolery. If it can benefit me, I'll gladly have that debate... But this is simply nonsense. This person is obviously never, ever, ever going to do anything but yell at the rest of the world because we won't let him have his game. This way it's not his fault or simply not doing it, he is a victim of circumstance and he is trying his best but his dreams of becoming a game maker are simply not in the cards.

Buy me a pizza and a 2 liter of coke and I'll explain it to you, it should take about an hour of me continuously talking so get lots of sleep...

 

Should I be getting this sleep before or during your hour of talking?

Personally give the threads Ony linked, which I either hadn't seen before or simply forgot existed, pretty much indicate the OP as I suspected.

He clearly has unrealistic expectations, as given both by his idea of an acceptable budget and by his pathetic excuse for a game design document (regardless of whether or not he calls it that). He does not know the process because he has never done it himself.

He clearly has no intentions of changing his modus operandi as indicated by how willingly he threw off every suggestion given by those who have launched products. Either commercial or otherwise.

He clearly has no intentions of fulfilling the Kickstarter or he would be compromising to one or both of the above.

 

That's all well and good... But I can tell you why he's doing all this, and that's why I'm an effing wizard.

 

See though that requires pizza and coke. I'm broke.

 

I'll give you the abridged version as a free preview....

He doesn't know the answer to this one super important question:

What comes after this?

 

Let me save you paying the wizard. "External Locus of Control".

 

Anyone can look at something and say, "This is ______." Why is it?

 

Yeah wccrawford's is the only one I saw that looked close to an actual quote. Covering what he would include. What he would throw out of the project scope. Time and money estimate.

 

Or essentially he is blaming everyone else for his failure to make his product?

I think most people simply looked at the design document and concluded that an actual quote wasn't worth the effort.

 

"Or essentially he is blaming everyone else for his failure to make his product?"

... A lot more straightforward than external locus of control

 

It was a slight re-wording of the following page's definition.

http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2009/external-locus-of-control/

 

Yes. Aside from this thread being exhibit A, this post is good indication.

Ony has offered what I think is going to help op the most - and it isn't a nice broken down quote. It's a kick into action. He is smart enough to learn how to make the game he wants, and in 4 years he could have made it several times over. Take responsibility man! People know you can do it, or they wouldn't still be here talking to you!

 

I don't think there's much confusion that he's blaming everyone else for his problems

 

You can do it!

What is a Rob Schneider movie

 

Do you think the kinds of people who unnecessarily use the words 'external locus of control' also watch Rob Schneider movies? My my the riff-raff these days...

 

And still there was no pizza

 

I want some pizza.

 

This is what I am saying.

It's the one food you can't get in a drive thru