I want to start making something similar, I have some ideas. I have already started doing research and tutorials with the platform I am comfortable with and have started learning about Unity and other engines.

My question is that, does a game like that requiere a lot of people to do the graphics/animations. What is the size of the team who made these two games?

With a game maker, it might be done within a week but with more limitations.
If you use high level tools and languages, you should be able to make a good game in one or two years.
If you search for the ultimate tools or pay too much attention to small details, you will get bored with the project before it is finished.
If you have more than 5 programmers in the team, 90% of the time will be wasted on poor communication.

Well your question is a little too vague, even though you used specific examples. I'll try:

Fruit Ninja was a game made by a professional game development company with access to experienced programmers and excellent artists. It's an extremely polished finished product. If you mean exactly Fruit Ninja, then yes, it requires a large team. I believe they finished the game in 3 - 6 weeks, but again, they had a bunch of people who already knew what they were doing, project managers, etc. You're just a programmer as far as I know. There's a lot more to a game than just simply making it work.

If you mean Fruit Ninja vaguely, as in some simple gameplay, then sure you could make that alone. It'd be a great project to try. But if you're trying to push a professional project, you'll need an artist and some music, and a means of testing your game on a significant number of different people. It's a ton of work. That's just the nature of games.

Check out the speech given by the lead designer of fruit ninja on GDC Vault. It was amazing. He describes the development process in detail.

Graphics aside, most of the hard part of a game like Angry Birds is going to be the UI really. They use a readily available physics engine called Box2D which makes most of the game play mechanics easy. Box2D allows you to create a 2d shape-based world that matches up with what you see on screen. When you want to launch an object you just apply a force to a shape. The rest of what happens occurs under the hood as the physics engine figures out how all the collisions sort out. Even for the pigs you can create callbacks to detect when certain shapes are hit.

Angry birds seems like a pretty simple game to make entirely because of readily available engines/sdks. Again though, what angry birds has is POLISH.. very clean looking graphics and gameplay. That is where the time is going to be spent really. But you could create a similar variant relatively quickly that has at least the basic mechanics down.

With a game maker, it might be done within a week but with more limitations.
If you use high level tools and languages, you should be able to make a good game in one or two years.
If you search for the ultimate tools or pay too much attention to small details, you will get bored with the project before it is finished.
If you have more than 5 programmers in the team, 90% of the time will be wasted on poor communication.

I plan on getting started early 2013, and will be working alone. The game will be 2D and have some mediocre animation work.
Platform will be Android and programming wise I am capable, graphics/sound effects/UI design is not my strong suit.

The mechanics might very well be doable by a single programmer in a sane time, but creating the highly polished graphics, gameplay, user interface and content might not be easily achieved. If you know how to do those things properly however, you will likely get something that works after a few iterations of the features.

Creating a working prototype with the most basic of graphics is not a problem, I think I am capable of that. The involved physics should not be too complicated, the tough part is making it look pretty, as is with most games.

Well your question is a little too vague, even though you used specific examples. I'll try:

Fruit Ninja was a game made by a professional game development company with access to experienced programmers and excellent artists. It's an extremely polished finished product. If you mean exactly Fruit Ninja, then yes, it requires a large team. I believe they finished the game in 3 - 6 weeks, but again, they had a bunch of people who already knew what they were doing, project managers, etc. You're just a programmer as far as I know. There's a lot more to a game than just simply making it work.

If you mean Fruit Ninja vaguely, as in some simple gameplay, then sure you could make that alone. It'd be a great project to try. But if you're trying to push a professional project, you'll need an artist and some music, and a means of testing your game on a significant number of different people. It's a ton of work. That's just the nature of games.

Check out the speech given by the lead designer of fruit ninja on GDC Vault. It was amazing. He describes the development process in detail.

This is what I fear... I am just a lone young programmer and I feel that I will never be able to get something as polished as fruit ninja all on my own .. unless I spend months and months... I agree there is a lot more to a game then just simply making it work.. but that is all I am capable of (making it work).. the other stuff.. well that will come with time I guess.

and thanks! I will be sure to check out the video. I am afraid it might demotivate me though because they have resources and I am just myself.

Any game can theoretically be made by a single person, it will just take a lot longer. Also, that person needs to be able to perform all the tasks necessary to complete the project. If you want to make a game like Angry Birds, on that calibur, for example, you will need people who can do the following things:

* Program all parts of the game (programmer)
* Design characters and objects for the game (character designer)
* Draw art and animation frames (artist)
* Compose music that fits the game (music director/composer)
* Design puzzles and levels with intrigue (level designer)
* Coordinate all of the design into a polished game (game designer)

Simply making the code is not enough. The design aspect of the game is what is most important. Angry Birds was not popular because someone programmed it. It was popular because it had a lot of polish, catchy music, cute characters, vibrant graphics, and level designs that interested people in playing and challenging their friends to high scores. You need all of those things to make a really good game.

It is possible that one person could do all of those things. It's not hard to find someone who can design characters and draw the art for them as well. I am a 2D artist who knows a bit about music composition as well, so that's already a few of those things down. Designing the levels is probably the hardest part, IMO, because you have to make sure it is fun.

You will still need people to test the game other than the people who made it, so there will always be more than one person. But you can always let your friends and family test it, find people online who want to play your beta and offer feedback, whatever. As far as the production part goes, though, you will need someone who can do all those things. You can do it all yourself if you are really good at art, music, design, etc., and of course, that would take longer than if you had multiple people working on it, because they could get it all done at once.

But yeah. Just programming the game is not all that goes into making a game.

If you make a game that truly is fun and interesting, even if it looks ugly, you may be able to find someone who likes it enough to offer to do some better art for you. I remember some game on Steam Greenlight that looked horrid because the person drew it themselves in Microsoft Paint with a mouse it seemed, but the game concept was very fun and people offered to do the art for it. I don't know if they offered for some kind of commission/contract deal, but they got an artist simply because they had a good game design.

And yeah, the game design is important, too. Not just the way it looks, but the way it plays. You could code the most impressive physics engine in the world all by yourself, and it would mean nothing for a game if you didn't make a fun game with it. No matter how great your physics and how complex your prototype, if your game is boring to play, no one will care.

1 / 2 years? arent you overcomplicating stuff? using already made plaforms for physics and rendering (heck if you know how, you could roll your own), and if you are confortable with development you can pretty much throw a game like this in a few months. Those games are not that much complicated, with a team of about 5 guys, artists sound and programmers, you can do it in that time frame.

I usually make 90% of the game in the first month and spend the rest of the time on polishing the details, finding bugs and usability analysis.