Long story short, I want to make a game like Final Fantasy III for SNES. I have no coding experience. Ideally, I would love to save up thousands of dollars and pay somebody else to make it for me. This is a long term goal.

What exactly, would it take to create a game like this? I read in another thread that Skyrim had an $80 million budget. Would it cost millions to make an old SNES RPG? Thousands? Hundreds?

What kind of work are we talking here? I know that the game is huge, the world is huge, the backstories are huge. So obviously a lot of work. I'm a musician so I figured I could compose and record all of the music for the game in my studio.

Is this a reasonable goal? I'd love to have my own game like final fantasy.

There's a huge difference between Skyrim and Final Fantasy 3.

If you are talking about graphics and gameplay like:

You're talking about a few hundred dollars for music (let's say, ~$500. The more you spend, you get more music and better quality),

a few hundred dollars for artwork (~$500. Again, more money = more art, and better art)

Programming it from scratch will be your main cost, since you'll need to hire a programmer for a significant amount of time, and they don't come cheap.

However: You can just go buy the latest "RPG Maker" tool, and design your own RPG pretty easily, writing dialog and creating areas to your heart's content.

There's plenty of free music, free art, and free tutorials you can use to create your game, and supplement it with some original music and art as necessary.

I think the latest is called RPG Maker VX Ace, but I might be mistaken. It says $70 on Steam, but I've had like three copies of this: One I bought for $25, one someone gifted me, and another that was part of a bundle, so if you wait, you'll likely be able to pick up a copy for cheap. Probably in a Christmas sale in a few days or something.

[Edit:] Actually, it looks like I still have the key from the bundle. Google RPG Maker VX Ace, see if it suits your desires. If it looks like what you want, I'll gift you the RPG Maker VX Ace tool.

However: You can just go buy the latest "RPG Maker" tool, and design your own RPG pretty easily, writing dialog and creating areas to your heart's content.

There's plenty of free music, free art, and free tutorials you can use to create your game, and supplement it with some original music and art as necessary.

[Edit:] Actually, it looks like I still have the key from the bundle. Google RPG Maker VX Ace, see if it suits your desires. If it looks like what you want, I'll gift you the RPG Maker VX Ace tool.

Thanks for the response. RPG Maker VX Ace, looks really, really awesome. I would love to play around with that if you don't mind gifting it.

Ideally, I would want to create my own sprites and certain buildings. Honestly, a lot of the templates in the RPG maker would work just fine for lots of stuff like trees and non important buildings. For the more interesting buildings and stuff though I would rather create my own. Is there a way to import your own homemade sprites into that maker? Thanks again for the info!

What quality level, how much content, and how long are you okay with it taking? You could buy a copy of RPG Maker, hire a few pixel artists and a musician, and possibly churn out an SNES-quality RPG in several years. If you want it to go quicker you'll be spending that much more money. If you yourself can do pixel art and music you can probably do this entirely for free after the cost of RPG Maker, but it'll probably take many years.

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the response. As far as quality goes, I'd like my RPG to be very similar to Final Fantasy III. As far as how much content, not really sure, but Ideally, my game would be as long as FF III in game play length.

Ideally, I would want to create my own sprites and certain buildings. Honestly, a lot of the templates in the RPG maker would work just fine for lots of stuff like trees and non important buildings. For the more interesting buildings and stuff though I would rather create my own. Is there a way to import your own homemade sprites into that maker?

Absolutely you can import your own. There is a large RPG Maker community, so if you go to the forums or google for RPG Maker VX Ace tutorials, there's alot of information and alot of people who can help you. This forum (GameDev.net) doesn't have as much experience with that particular tool (most the people here, myself included, use more advanced tools or make our own tools - which takes years to learn how to do).

I PM'd you the link to the copy of the game I had. Good luck on your RPG adventures!

I think the latest is called RPG Maker VX Ace, but I might be mistaken. It says $70 on Steam, but I've had like three copies of this: One I bought for $25, one someone gifted me, and another that was part of a bundle, so if you wait, you'll likely be able to pick up a copy for cheap. Probably in a Christmas sale in a few days or something.

The latest one is RPG Maker MV

It is bit pricey though compared to the older versions and honestly I haven't tried this one out, but apparently they have done quite some upgrades. There is no more 800x600 resolution limits. Apparently you can also now port to mobile platform and HTML5. The scripting language has been changed to JS from what I think used to be Ruby?

Also I just happened to check BundleStars today, so if you want to get VX Ace for decent price you could pick one up from there. VX Ace seems to be tier 2.

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/ultimate-game-makers-bundle

Hopefully this didn't seem like too much of an advert...

Thanks, I wasn't aware of MV.

Well, I found this sprite creator online called Piskel (http://www.piskelapp.com/)

It turns out that I'm not very good at creating sprites haha. I failed horribly at creating a character and I can't even imagine having to do that with EVERY character, boss, building, and weapon in an entire game.

I need to find some people to do this for me. I will gladly pay them.

It turns out that I'm not very good at creating sprites haha. I failed horribly at creating a character and I can't even imagine having to do that with EVERY character, boss, building, and weapon in an entire game.

I need to find some people to do this for me. I will gladly pay them.

First go to OpenGameArt.org and get some free sprites.

Then use those free sprites as placeholders as you make your game.

Once your game is 80% complete, then pay artists to go through your game and upgrade the art with custom-made art.

If you have zero experience making games, then hiring people before you have your game almost complete is not the best thing to do.