Hi fellow developers. I am still in my beginning stages but there's a question or two that I am really curious about. Think about the games such as Zelda (the older ones, such as Links Awakening, oracle of seasons / ages) and also the pokemon games. These look like they are built by using tiles. Now my main question is, is it possible for one person to completely build a game by oneself, maybe one other person? Such as the games named above..

I understand games take time to get a good final product. I just don't understand where the majority of the time is being spent on when all you have to do is create different maps by using simple numbers to specify what tile is grass or water or a house etc.. Once you create maps, its just putting the story and code together to interact with everything. It seems to me that tile games should take the least amount of time to finish.

Would it really take a lot of people to produce a pokemon type tile game?

Thanks.

Mark

Quote:Original post by marky03
Hi fellow developers. I am still in my beginning stages but there's a question or two that I am really curious about. Think about the games such as Zelda (the older ones, such as Links Awakening, oracle of seasons / ages) and also the pokemon games. These look like they are built by using tiles. Now my main question is, is it possible for one person to completely build a game by oneself, maybe one other person? Such as the games named above..

I understand games take time to get a good final product. I just don't understand where the majority of the time is being spent on when all you have to do is create different maps by using simple numbers to specify what tile is grass or water or a house etc.. Once you create maps, its just putting the story and code together to interact with everything. It seems to me that tile games should take the least amount of time to finish.

Would it really take a lot of people to produce a pokemon type tile game?

Yes, I'd say that a game of this sort can be made by one or two people (assuming I have the right idea about what sort of game you're referring to). How long it takes will depend on a variety of factors, including developer experience, tools used, target platforms, etc. I would think it could take anywhere from a few months to a few years, depending on the circumstances.

The best way to find out where the time goes when making a game is probably just to start making one.

Again though, it depends. If you write it 'from scratch', a lot of time will be spent writing, testing, and debugging code. (Your comment about 'just putting the story and code together' indicates that you may not have much programming experience; saying that programming a game from scratch is 'just putting code together' is kind of like saying that building an airplane is 'just putting some parts together'.)

If however you use a game engine or authoring tool such as Game Maker, Unity, Shiva, etc., you'll most likely spend less time coding and more time working on the game content itself.

Quote:Original post by marky03
Once you create maps, its just putting the story and code together to interact with everything.

You realise that "putting the story and code together to interact with everything" takes about 10x longer and is 100x more complicated than creating a tile map, right?

Quote:Original post by marky03

I understand games take time to get a good final product. I just don't understand where the majority of the time is being spent on when all you have to do is create different maps by using simple numbers to specify what tile is grass or water or a house etc.. Once you create maps, its just putting the story and code together to interact with everything. It seems to me that tile games should take the least amount of time to finish.

The first Zelda has approximately 1000 rooms (I am pulling this number out of my ass but it sounds about right). Get a decent tile editor and make 10 rooms and tell me how long it takes. Then add in object and enemy placements for each of those rooms. Then add in character scripts, plots, dialogue, etc. for a small portion of a story. Now multiply that by a 100 to see how long it will take to make a game of that scope.

Content creation is the longest part of game development. It's why the ratio of artists to programmers on a game project is high.

All of you have gave me some great information towards me questions. You all have pointed out several key factors for me to realize. Thank you everyone :)


Marky

Actually, graphics are quite simple. Use Creative Commons or some other source of free art, use a paint program, or some oher means, then save it as a bmp, then use BmpToRaw to convert to RAW files. Make a texture loader which is approximately 10-20 lines of code, sometimes less, sometimes more. Then find a good sound library and either find a source of free sounds, or create your own. For other graphics such as sprite, you could also use paint, or you caould make your own graphics app. That's what I've done. Raw data is a quite simple format. So if you want to make your own art app, then I'll just say that raw data uses this format:

Each value is defined by an ascci value. From 0 or NULL to 255. The amount of characters for rgb is 3*l*w.

You could also make your own format. I made a format called dan, which is a list of vertexes and colors that's been encrypted, and other stuff.


Basically time is based on quality, and what you want.