How Long Does It Take To Make A Video Game?

how long does it take to make a game for most commercial games that time lies somewhere between two and four years but everything between ten minutes and ten years is entirely possible and it's also almost definitely gonna take way longer than you think in this video I want to help you make an educated guess on how long it will take you to create your game and I'll do the same for my own indie game project will you snail so why does making a game almost always take way longer than you think I want you to picture your game as a square the surface area of that square is the work you need to get done in order to finish it on the x-axis is all of the content you have to produce for your game and on the y-axis is the quality and the polishing of that content now here's the fallacy a lot of us fall into let's assume 50% of your content is done and it's at 50% of the polishing you want to have for your final game how much percent of your game have you already completed intuitively it feels like 50% but with this visualization we obviously

know that's not true because it's only 25% this fellas is even more dangerous when you just got started maybe you think well this is going really quickly I already have 10% completed but yeah it's only 1% now I want you to imagine your game as a giant pyramid because ah you thought this was everything no it gets worse building the first layer of a pyramid is easy you just put the bricks next to each other on the ground now the problem is the higher your pyramid gets the harder it is to get those blocks up there and in game development that is the equivalent to your project gets bigger clunkier it's harder to find stuff load and compile times increase testing your game takes longer fixing bugs takes longer even implementing new code takes way longer so this is probably not even 25% this is probably 20% now last but not least making a game is also like biking through a valley you start out super motivated and acid downhill battle but sooner or later you'll run out of steam all of the fun tasks in your project

will already be gone so all that's left to do is tedious and annoying stuff you don't want to do you're starting to get burned out and obviously your mental state heavily influences your rate of progression you will need more brakes you will get distracted more easily and just in general it consumes a lot of willpower because you have to fight the urge to stop and turn around considering your motivation levels 20% is more like 15 oh you think we can get this number even lower I mean sure we haven't even talked about feature creep yet because guess what you're square magically keeps expanding while you're trying to fill it up oh and did I already mention there might be a broken brick in the very first layer of your pyramid and in order to replace it you need to pull everything down again also remember that real life gets in the way when you least expect it for example your hard drive could crash or you could break your arm so all of that is why it will take a lot longer than you think so how long will it take you to make a game there are a lot of factors but undoubtedly the most important ones are the size of your project and the size of your team filling a giant square alone

can take 5 years or more filling a small square together can be done at 3 months or less if you want to finish your game in a reasonable amount of time you either need a small square or a big team but is your square small enough or is it already too big I'd say let's just run the math you can see I just made a giant list with all of the tasks I still need to get done it's quite a lot and then next to it is an estimation of how many hours I think that task will take so for example writing the menu system I think that will take me 4 hours so you're basically measuring the size of your square and the further you are into development the more precise your estimation is going to be so if you want to make a really good assumption of how long it will take you to create a game I recommend creating a vertical slice that means you only produce a tiny fraction of your content but you get it up to 100% of the polish all right there's only one level and we'll use nails so far but it is already very

polished and it will almost look identical in the final game the advantage of that workflows that now I know how long it takes me to get the content to the quality level I want and I can make a good educated guess on how long it will take me to finish the rest of the game and then I add all of that up here I have different categories for example here finishing the vertical slice all of that I think will be about 130 hours if I add up all of the tasks then here are the regular levels these times your hour per level and then I multiply that by 20 because I want to have about 20 of these levels that equals 300 about 380 hours when you make these estimates remember that everything will take a lot longer than you think and then here I have just a bunch of extra time for stuff like marketing for composing the music some extra time for the boss better some extra time for Easter eggs some extra time for polishing you really want to cover everything here and then here is the grand total so if we add up all of those tasks above we get a grand total of 1100

hours but even if you make quite a generous guest you shouldn't stop there depending on your experience in game development you should add another buffer somewhere between 20 and 100 percent that's simply due to the fact that when you're making a game for the first time there will be a lot of things you'll forget in your calculation but even with a lot of experience you almost always need that extra 20 percent if we add 20% that's 1320 hours how many hours per week can I work on this project for me that's 20 hours because the other 20 hours spent on YouTube and community management so if I take no holidays no vacation finishing this project will take me sixty six weeks so obviously we should add some vacation time as well once again be quite generous with that because finishing your project faster than expected it's not a big deal but if it's the other way around that could potentially mean your game will never see the day of light we end up at almost two years let's a little longer than I would have hoped but I guess some two years to

finish will you snail sounds about realistic so here comes the time to make a very tough call because now you need to decide are you willing to invest that amount of time do you believe in your project do you trust it most of you know my situation I recently quit my studies now I live at home with my dad so there is a time window now where I can try to make the scheme development and YouTube thing work and I'm kind of confident but two years that means this game might very well be the only chance I get now the last and maybe most important tip I have for you is be a little smart about how you approach things for example just start filling out a very small square your Minimum Viable Product if it's well received you can still turn it into a bigger game if you start with a big square just make sure you have some opportunities to scale down if necessary for will you snail I already have a couple of ideas what I would cut from the game if I wanted to reduce the scope

if I wanted to I could turn this two-year project into a three month project at any time and I think that makes it a lot less scary now will I commit and how will this project continue [Music] [Music] you