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[LUTOPiA]

I just got HeroEngine and i had a few ideas for games, but i know i should only pick one and develop that, so i want to know which one would be cheaper to develop:


Trading Card Game.

No AI computer opponents and no automated functions of cards. The player manipulates the cards freely as in a real card game and the rules are enforced by the players themselves through a chat log that keeps track of all actions and not by the game itself.
I would use public art for the cards and do the rest myself, all this is to cut down on development costs. It would need a way to sell card packs so it can monetize.


Chess-like Game.

Like the Trading Card Game example above, but with chess pieces and board. The camera would be top down fixed. Players could customize their own army from a selection of game pieces with their own specific movements.


Ship MMO.

Will use placeholder free assets for now to cut down on costs. It functions like a normal MMO, but the characters are ships. It would need a modification to keep the ships from turning around instantly like in a normal MMO and instead they will be forced to move forward and turn at various degrees. This turning ability would need to be a statistic so some ships turn sharper than others. The ships would also need a recharge time for each attack and this recharge time would also need to be a statistic. Finally, the weapon that can be targeted depends on which side of the ship is facing the enemy.

[Chromehound]

Do a Ship MMO with a trading card game and chess within it

Might as well do something while you're out at sea.....

as for estimate, I don't think there really could be too accurate of results for that.  You could find someone willing to work for free and make money on it later, or someone that works for $1k, another for $10k....etc...etc.

[Ineedcash12]

What you have described is so vague, thats its impossible to answer.

Its like going to a contractor to have you build a home, and just asking for a house.

as you can imagine,  thats everything from a shack to a huge mansion, but still asking for a estimate.

unless you have more details on the game, it will be impossible.

I suggest googling game design documents, think the game through, from start to end.

With those details, you may be able to get a price. Even then, it'll be hard, as the game is changing because of content that just didnt work.

Itd be like having the contractor thats building your house, build it half way, then you dont like something, have them tear it down, and start over.   So the orginal estimate is out the window.

Your best bet is to develop the ideas, put on paper, find people that have the same interest as you, and then start working on the game.

The trading card game or chess will be cheaper, as it has only a few dozen to maybe 100 assets.

[LUTOPiA]

Ineedcash12,

I don't think is that vague. In your example, i am asking contractors how much a 2 story, 5 bedroom, 2 bath house with a pool would cost. Sure, i don't have exact measurements but they shouldn't be needed when looking for a ballpark estimate.

If it helps, i can use some similar examples:

The TCG can be like MagicWorkStation or Apprentice, but adapted to be played in a browser and Facebook.

The Chess game is...well, just like a Chess game that can be played on a browser and Facebook except that i cam make my own pieces with their unique movements.

The ship MMO is basically a set of modifications to HeroEngine. No turning back except by moving forward in a curve and the sharpness of this turning is a stat. Speed of movement is another stat. Attacking has a cooldown period which is governed by a stat and targeting your attacks depends on a fixed field of view for every weapon and also a range.

I think that is specific enough for any professional to be able to give me a general estimate.

[DNA_klownicus]

To contract programmers/animators/3d modellers it would be in the thousands if not more. None of them work cheap and you would need alot of work done.

[PN-Dwight]

I know that Cooper can bring you in contact with professional teams consisting of both artists, technical artists and programmers. Their minimum contract duration is 3 months (as far as I remember), and they ask a low 5 figure number

[LUTOPiA]

Five figures to make a chess game or a few scripts in HE?

I don't think so. That's laughable and exploitative.

[Caldenfor]

He/she(not taking the time to research at all sorry lol) was merely pointing out that there are professionals available and what their price range typically is.

You should make a chess game like what they had in Star Wars where the pieces actually fight each other.

[LUTOPiA]

But i don't want to make a complex game, i want to make a simple game.

My chess game idea is just like the rest of chess games out there, except that i can make my own chess pieces for the players to use. That's it.

[FI-ScottZ]

Even a simple game can take time, usually more than one would think.  And yes, for hiring people it can get very expensive.  I worked in an IT department as an intern doing some basic tasks and made $25/hr; the contractor who shared the office with me made $92/hr.  No lie.  Programming is not cheap.  Granted, people in the gaming industry do not always make quite as much, it can still be a lot.

Every group using HeroCloud to-date I believe is a collection of people volunteering their time to try to turn a dream into reality.  If you can manage to find like-minded people with talent and ambition, you might be able to make a similar go of it.  Else you better have deep pockets.

[Stadi_Thompson]

Already covered:

https://community.heroengine.com/forums/index.php/topic,845.0.html

[LUTOPiA]

But it's not covered. I doubt a few HE scripts would cost a quarter million dollars. I mean, that's just laughable.

[Prometheus2012]

Tbh most people looking at these forums, and at indie developers as a whole, have to realise that they wont get paid properly until a project either A)looks highly likely to make it to release or B)gets released and starts bringing in money.

People have to come up with some amicable contract that is good for both the cash strapped CEO/project lead and the contractor.

My team knows that when and if our project makes money, they will all be getting a tidy sum. But as they are all basically working for free, i cant "demand" stuff like i could if they were contracted to get money each month.

[Brian_SG]

This is a reasonable question if you're new to the gaming industry and don't yet understand how it works.  The question reminds me of when I was a studio producer and would spend 8 hours with a band / singer recording a 5 minute long song and another 20 hours mixing, and I was always amazed that the engineers I worked with could work so incredibly fast.  Meanwhile, some people think a 5 minute long song literally only takes 5 minutes to record.  If you don't know, you don't know.

The type of game it is, is completely irrelevant.  It's all about the design and art.  This conversation about houses and contractors... it's like asking how much a house costs and the house could be a mansion, a ginger bread house, a doll house, the White House... the customer doesn't know the difference.  Faxion Online which used the HeroEngine took a little over a year with a little over a dozen people.  It also shut down as soon as it was released.  If they each got paid $50k a year, there were 17 of them working for 15 months, that's over a million dollars.  Pretty damn cheap.  The other extreme, SWTOR with a few hundred people that cost over $300 million.

Outside of the HE, you can make a 2D game with mediocre art and program it in Flash.  Maybe two people(artist and a programmer) could do that in a year for about $100k for both of them if you got new people just starting out.  That will get you a mediocre game with a lot of bugs and problems on a 3rd party hosted website that will crash if you get any decent amount of traffic.

If you're talking about doing something in the HeroEngine, a few scripts won't change much.  I'm pretty sure every single developer here is gutting the entire system and replacing hundreds / thousands of scripts with their own.  You're not going to do that over a weekend.  You're looking at a team of 2-20 developers getting paid around $50k a year(double that if they're in a big city) each working 1-4 years.  And that's just the programmers.  You'll need artists(concept artists, texture / graphic artists, modelers, technical artists, animators), audio people, designers, and testers.

The bottom line, if you think a quarter of a million dollars to make a simple MMO is laughable, I agree, but for the opposite reason.

[Stadi_Thompson]

Well said Brian.