How Long Do These Things Take?

[ketchupgun]

To all you smarty-pants out there that create these fabulous emulators and homebrews.

How long does this stuff take? I'm really curious.

(I'm a graphic designer for print, and I know how long projects take...I've done a few websites, and I find them way too labour intensive and a real PITA...I could only imagine how long making an emulator or a game takes).

So speak up Devs, and let's hear your stories!

 

[X-Code]

In my case ages :lol:, I always think that I've nearly finished and BLAM!, another idea to add ( with all the extra debugging and bugdigging ). It's enjoyable most of the time though

 

[ruckage]

Depends on the game really.

Ruck-Man was the biggest project I've attempted to date, I lost track in the end of how many hours I spent on it. Graphics took a long while for that one as there are over 700 images that make up the game (mostly animation for the sprites), the program was also quite big with over 4000 lines of code, not including the level editor I made for it as well. To give an indication of time spent, the last 3 weeks before the deadline I was up until 3.00am most nights trying to get it finished in time. Musn't forget to add the hours Pat put into making the music as well.

So basically games can take a hell of a long time to make - good job I enjoy it and have no money for a social life as otherwise they would never get finished .

 

[Daid]

Really depents on the project. My SuperSonicSpeed game for the GBAX contest took 5 days, in the evenings. But it's not that polished and I hardly did any testing
And I was lucky that I could scrape it together from other projects.

 

[quasist]

While working on FleshChamer I gave to project all my spare time in GBAX period. So I had weeks of great coding pleasure.
I spent most of time on coding and designing 8bit music.

 

[Dr_Ian]

My cat game has now 21,473 lines and about 120 individual sprites and a lot of other stuff. I have been working on it for about a year.

 

[skeezix]

An emu port can be trivial... first 'run' (crappy, but visible) coudl take a day; a good port, a few weeks of hard work to make it fancy and optimized.

A emu from scratch depends on the systenm; an Amiga emu from scratch.. a year

Project wise.. Battlejewels is months of hard labour, to get it tweaked and balanced, pollished and pretty .. the AI, the design and whole system, getting it all looking sweet, not to mention Ste on artwork.. months of labour. I've spent on and off a good 7 mo on BJ now

jeff

 

[Micket]

I've probably spent a couple of hundred hours on OldPlay. I dont really dare on guessing, but it's a massive amount of time. And i didn't even mae the first versions of it! (Although, just understanding all the code was half the work)

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

Whens the deadline?

Two weeks after that.

 

[Blah]

Months ago I started to reimplement the VNS (virtual novel system) engine from scratch, I got a proof of concept ready in two days. In a month I had 70% of the original features reimplemented. After that, everything slowed down. I've made hardly any progress since and have put it on hiatus to work on other projects.

 

[Alex.]

A good game needs more time than just the programming/graphics/sound work. It is always useful to take long breaks from it fairly often, to clear your mind and get the chance to approach things from a fresh perspective. Plus, the slower you take it, the more mature and polished everything will be.

That's why it's great to have multiple projects, and switch working on them every two weeks or so.

 

[ruckage]

A good game needs more time than just the programming/graphics/sound work. It is always useful to take long breaks from it fairly often, to clear your mind and get the chance to approach things from a fresh perspective. Plus, the slower you take it, the more mature and polished everything will be.

That's why it's great to have multiple projects, and switch working on them every two weeks or so.

I agree with you, I tend to do the coding more or less in one big chunk but I spend months before hand working through the idea, making notes, drawing graphics and performing simple tests to see how things work. I often go back to things much later and rework the idea until I think I'm ready to code the main project.

 

[notaz]

I mostly code during weekends when I have time (sometimes few hours, sometimes whole day), and after work during the work days (1-3hours). Going like this, here are times for some of my projects (based on my local svn logs):

Adding basic Sega CD support to PicoDrive (to only run Sonic CD): ~ 4 weeks
Optimizing noiz2sa: ~ 1 week
PicoDrive 1.10 -> 1.20: ~3.5 weeks
SDHC firmware hack: ~4 days
gpfce: > 2 months

This also doesn't include time for thinking about those things (while walking/riding bus to work, etc.). I also switch between projects while they are being worked on.

 

[YakumoFuji]

Fishguts is approaching a year in development. Core engine work is pretty easy, content is really hard. I have a main story arc, the hard part is the NPC dialogue and spreading + linking clues throughout the world and tieing in all the things that happen in the game and such.

with a 5 week old baby, its tough being a new dad and writing code

I also need to come up with a real 'name' for the game as opposed to calling it its codename Fishguts 1

my parents are arriving from australia for 6 weeks, so no development will probably happen before end of August now. It would be _REALLY_ nice to get it into alpha testing by xmas but I honestly dont see it happening (unless I hit some free time and things just pour from my soul into the game)....

(dev blog here here )
newer screenies with some old tiles on this post here

I envy folks who can knock things out in weeks/month short time

 

[charlieb]

Well according to my version control system I made the first commit for my cube shooter game 7 months ago. I work on this every weekend between 2 and 12 hours a day and many evenings for a couple of hours plus the occasional lunch break. The first commit, I would estimate probably too about a month because the code 1) works and 2) actually does something. So for a very rough estimate I'm about 700 hours in which is about 17 full work weeks (8 hrs * 5).
For all that work I'm really quite close to completion; my main thrust in the coming weeks is game content, of which there is currently very little, oh yeah and there's no sound yet ... ok so I just have to write and integrate sound and music (I have never written code for sound before) and generate 90% more content (including sound) and I'm there.

Oh god why did I answer this post !?

Charlie

 

[mittens]

Whens the deadline?

Two weeks after that.

exactly.

 

[Parkydr]

I find I get things done quicker if I have a few hours for coding but most of the time I just get the odd couple of hours here and there.

It always seems to get take time to get up to speed again after an interruption.

 

[Quiest]

I also have multiple projects going most of the time, and they are of different sizes... can`t really tell how long it takes for me to finish something, mostly because I`m a mood coder, I can get stuff done only when I`m in the mood to, but I guess it my projects were finished from 1 week to never

 

[quasist]

Too demoralizing topic it is
It is like to read about hard level-upping in some sort online game.
We are not are slaves to homebrew industry, aren't we?

All comes to sancrificing time and riping the spiritual fruit of our work.
So it should be lasting for ever!

P.S: Ignore my NPC speech