Hello everyone! It's me, Mr. Slate, for yet another ramble. This time it's a short one seeing as last week I went too long for what I want these write-ups to be. Straight to it then!
I'm going to give you a short heads up of how long games actually take for a solo developer. Particularly how much of the time is taken up with content. By content I mean what you do in a game, what you interact with, what you see, the objects, not the systems necessarily. MoonWard is very dialogue and story heavy, so in this case the content is mostly dialogue, images, world building/lore and stories.
To the left are my "napkin" estimates. As you can see the bulk of the time will be taken up by writing the main/side story, the stories for the procedural bounties and the image pool for the image composition system.
These are unlikely to be the final durations as I've noticed there's a fair amount of time needed for editing, trimming and lore updates.
Everything listed here uses systems already present in the game. Theoretically, I can stop improving the engine and begin building content. Of course, realistically, I have at least a month's worth of technical updates and new systems/features to implement before I'm happy with the game's design and complexity.
Then there's QA, which will be significantly more present for the final release for obvious reasons.
Finally the release trailer, which I will once again build the majority of in Unity. Obviously with the help of an artist for the characters and musician for the music. Maybe a VO artist but it all depends on the budget. A single week is probably too optimistic but I think with all the tech I've got from the reveal trailer it should be possible. Especially if I remember to commission assets well in advance.
As of now it looks like MoonWard needs about another 16 weeks of work. Like I said, that estimate is fairly optimistic but doable. By the way, that makes Friday 13th 2023 a possible release date. That made me chuckle. No commitment obviously but it would be funny if I could hit that day.
Anyway. Like I said, this one is short. You can thank me for that, now.
Have a nice week and hope to see you next Tuesday for more rambles!
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