How long does it take you?

#1 1. It has its quirks, but so does pretty much every engine I've worked with. It's reasonably easy though, took me maybe a week or two to get up to speed with the art pipeline, but I've worked with a lot of odd engines before so it's usually fairly easy for me to figure things like this out.

2-3. This is pretty much impossible to answer, it depends. I'm assuming you are (rather) new to making games (else you would already have had some idea of what's needed as far as manpower and time goes). The only suggestion I can give is to start small; design your game so you can finish it with whatever people you already have available in roughly 6 months. You can tackle that grand game we all seem to have ideas for at a later date. With people that are new to making games 6 months is a rather short period, so as I said; start small! I really can't stress this enough. If you fail, fine, you've lost 6 months of your life and if you succeed you at least have a game...

I don't work on my own games at the moment but rather as a contractor on other peoples games. I can give one example from the game I'm currently working on though, Minions of Mirth was made with 3 people, and roughly 11 months. This is with very experienced people working full time though... so you should obviously start MUCH smaller if you're new and do this in your "spare time".

#2 2. 8 months (3rd person adventure game Basic Bob based on comedy)

3. Just me, and a contract artist(4 weeks) and musician(2 weeks)

#3 1. Speaking from the point of view of an artist, it has proven to be the easiest engine I have used so far. The biggest selling points for me have been that it is really easy export my models and see them in the engine immediately without the help of a programmer on the team and that it works on my mac. Working with other engines on virtual teams has been very slow because I have to wait for someone else to import my models before I can see what's up with them, which brings the iterative process to a grinding halt.

Scott

#4 1.Only issues with the engine is the treatment of transpariencies.Other than thaty, its realy easey and strightfoward to get art assets into the game easley.

#5

Quote:
I don't work on my own games at the moment but rather as a contractor on other peoples games. I can give one example from the game I'm currently working on though, Minions of Mirth was made with 3 people, and roughly 11 months.

That's not fair to say unless the MoM team dropped all the bought assets they once had aquired.
Maybe they did.. if that's the case then I'll eat my hat.

#6 I'm not sure how long MoM has been in development or the major shifts that it has seen (say moving from Quake 2 to TGE). But it is a stunning example of what a small team and contract workers can accomplish!

#7 I did a learning game for 1 year after I thought I knew torque pretty well I switched to my current one which I have been working on for 2 months and I forsee it going for another year. I'm a one man team right now though.

#8 I did a demo level with alot of code changes for my capstone project from school.
Took about 120 hours to:
Convert and Import GIS data for terrain -12 hours research and implementation.
Build new player model- (2200 poly, Wolf character in cowboy outfit- skinned+textured, 20 hours)
custom animate player model (18 hours, root-run-look-head-jump-standjump- 9 hours of it just to figure out the death actions... dang ski nodes)
insert code for: AI bots, double jump, and air control. (20 hours- learning script and C+)
setup new trees, bushes, rain emmiters, smoke emmiters,
paint the land properly,
Build 3 building using Quark (first time use) all good lookin western style.
... not bad for a solo artist with no programming skills.

but, like I said, it was a basic solo player game- kill all get to boss area, kill him too.

Now im trying to figure out how to record ingame video, or script realtime actions for my cut sceans- and adding a storyline...

#9 Minions of Mirth looks very good. And a staff of 3 people working full time for 11 months. That's at least a 1/4 million dollar budget. Great work. I'd be interested in buying it when it launches.

#10

Quote:That's at least a 1/4 million dollar budget.

Huh?

There were a couple years R&D on the programming/technology for Minions of Mirth. We started with Torque on Jan 17th, 2005. It was basically started from scratch at that point. This has been a mountain of work. It's going to feel weird to launch and then keep right on working on the game. ;)

-Josh Ritter
Prairie Games