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Old 08-05-2010, 07:38 AM   #42
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: Developing from scratch

That's exactly what I used to think, too. In fact the original plan for God Wars II involved only 3 months of development prior to beta testing.

It actually took 11 months, and the gameplay was still so basic that the beta testers soon lost interest and quit. After another 9 months I realised that I'd opened prematurely, so I spent 1 week creating another spinoff mud to test the engine - a much simpler pure PK game that had no mobs or character advancement, just player-versus-player combat.

It wasn't until after another 21 months that I finally had enough infrastructure in place to start properly beta testing God Wars II - that's a total of nearly 3.5 years development just to reach open beta. The mud then spent another 5 years in beta before I felt it was functional enough to be labelled "fully playable".

To put that in perspective with my earlier projects:

Creating a 16K mud from scratch: About 1 month of design, development, refactoring and testing, including extensive documentation.

Turning the above into a 7000-line pure PK mini-mud: Around 5 months, with most of the effort spent testing and reworking the mechanics.

Creating a fully playable game: Around 1.5 years of design and 8.5 years of development.

You want to know why the fully playable game took so long? Read my , and perhaps you'll get an idea of the sheer scale of it.

Producing a fully playable game from scratch is not a short-term project, but many people don't seem to believe that until they've actually tried it themselves. And of course most of them fail...which is a real shame, because some of the projects I've read about showed incredible promise.
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