Game Development Startup Question

Just for fun how much $$$/Time/Staff do you think it would take to reproduce a game similar to Pox?

Maybe 1/4 of the runes 1/8 of the abilities (to start) and half the Maps. No Campaigns but with Tutorials. Otherwise assume it's got all the same features, similar AI, similar art/graphics/sound, website, etc.

Maybe even through in a working chat just for the hell of it...

 

hmm. 5 people, 8-12 months, 200,000$. ? no idea.

of course only if you already have all the assets of pox.

 

Time and staff are correlated, if you want less time, more staff and viceversa.

Anyway i have no idea.

 

Assume you were starting from scratch. So all new artwork for runes, maps, sprites.

Forgot to mention that you could use an existing engine so you don't need to build one from scratch.

 

You could start this up for the following.

$24k = 20 rune battle group - 4 factions - $300 per pic for low quality
$100k = 2 contract programmers
$50k = minimum self-salary as CEO and COO
$20k = contract human resource services
$50k = contract promo services
$30k = software and hardware, minimal quality
$275 = a decent start

 

So you are telling us that for pox 2 you need 2 other promgrammers and 12 artist. Noted

 

Interesting my guess was:

$800,000 - $850,000 a year for 1 designer - 2 programmers - 4-5 Artists - Then Maybe 1.5 - years soft launch and full launch in 2.5 years. Initially Funding would be expected to carry for a bit after that so at a minimum 2.0 Million to carry plus another $200,000-$250,000 in Advertising.

I was way under on the amount of Artists (which makes sense) and maybe a bit over on salary.

Why skip the designer? I mean since that's your job and all I would be okay with you working for free and its very kind of you to offer. However since you got a growing family and all that to think about you may want to reconsider taking an unpaid internship.

 

I would also assume that on smaller project such as this the game designer would need to get there hands dirty with a good heap of programming and/or art design on top of everything else.

 

pretty kool post.
@Sokolov

I guess if I could only ask 1 question(I have many) , it would be this:
Is the game costly to keep running as is? Is it a drain on someone pocket, lending incentive to end it?
Or is the amount to maintain the game, as is, so small that it doesnt have much effect on the overall status of the holder of the game?
I know this is more then 1 question, lol, but I
im sure you understand

 

I would guess that the cost of keeping it online is not extreme. I would guess they probably rent out servers and with such a low population I can't imagine it's burning a hole in anyone's pocket.

That being said if they aren't releasing anything new and there's no money coming in well then there's no reason to keep running the company into the red either. My best guess is that eventually Desert Owl will release at least one or two more patches and the next expansion but beyond that who knows?

 

@Sokolov have to tried making a patreon pledge to revive pox give people stuff
Put 1m as budget people who donate 10-30$ get a free LE/tourney tickets
50-100 1 new expansion pack to 1 megabox for 100$
100$ + get 1 additional megabox every 100$Or 3 tourney tickets.

Make tickets 5$ each after

 

Well you should have thought of that before you talked me into this unpaid internship idea.

 

my issue would be the art and music, I could clone the game in maybe a year and a half in my off hours but I wouldn't have the money to pay for artists. thus you'd only effectively get pox the tron clone, or pox the childrens sketch theme, with black and colored lines heh.

my network experience is limited, I do a lot of back end work but I've only ever built one online multiplayer game, honestly I would expect that to give me some headaches.

anyway as fun as cloning pox would be, I doubt I'd have the determination to do it unpaid getting paid to do something helps me keep motivated, but I've long since moved past professional game development work which generally underpays, for more mundane software development =/

 

Yeah I don't blame you. It's insane the difference you can make doing essentially the same work. The reason I brought up this topic started when I was actually looking at job salaries for something completely unrelated and randomly decided to see what programmers make for video games. I can understand it as working on a video game sounds like a lot more fun than developing software that tracks data for a manufacturing company. Getting more people signed up for the latter should take additional financial incentive.

 

What online game did you build, calisk?

 

an iphone kart racing game that handled up to 8 players per session lol nothing i'd brag about, that was about 9 years ago heh.

I moved into software development and web development shortly after that, only game development I get to do now is 3 or 4 game jams a year but since I had a kid I don't even get to do those that often now.

 

Yeah I got a couple of those myself. Alright so if your confident you could reproduce the game under the parameters we've established from a programming stand point I am going to change my guess to 2.0 years. Hell maybe we can just pay you 1 and 1/2 salary to get it done on your own i 2.0. That would shave some dollars off the bottom line. So between you and Sok's unpaid internship as game design I'm feeling like this thing could get done a bit cheaper than I was thinking.

Now we just need a way to find some Artists willing to work for peanuts.......maybe there's some kind of sweatshop that specializes in creating game art.