Indies think big! Small.

by theworm · Published May 1, 2010 · Updated July 16, 2014

I know we’ve all been battered over the head by developers (large and independant) telling us that the best way to start making games is to start small, but don’t you just want to launch into that massive genre-defining RPG you’ve had in your head for years? Or you think you can do better than Modern Warfare? Maybe you have a World of Warcraft killer MMO you need to unleash on the world! And there are some people who say “sod the ‘start small’ lot, go big – dive into that RPG and even if you never finish it you will have learned so much from the experience you will always be glad you did”.

The usual reasons against starting a massive project are: keeping yourself motivated for years while working on the same thing, endless feature creep, iterative technical progress in the underlying code with no visible change in the actual game itself, and if you are part of small team multiply all the above times the number of people you have – and if one person drops out what happens to their workload?

But to many people those things are ephemeral, only ‘potential events’. They think “Yes, but that won’t apply to me, my game will be ‘different’.” For these people (and that included myself at one point) they need some clear evidence. Evidence:

Standard 2D top-down action-RPG example – Zelda III: A Link to the Past

Development team size = 16 (Not including production/managers [1])
Development time = 24 months (development actually started in 1998 on a NES Zelda III, but they switched to SNES for the eventual 1991 release, so assuming only 2 years of ‘proper’ development on the SNES title [2])
Man hours = 65280 (based on 8 hour working day, 5 days a week, one week off a year and not including very likely overtime)
= 1632 weeks, = 32 years

Standard 2D Platformer example – Super Mario World

Development team size = 10 (again not including production/managers [3])
Development time = 36 months [4]
Man hours = 61200 (based on same hours as above)
= 1530 weeks, = 30 years

So. Got a spare 32 years to make the next Zelda: A Link to the Past? Or perhaps 30 years for the next Super Mario World seems more maneageable for you?

FYI I have used these two games as examples since you will often find prospective indie devs say they want to create games like these. Also I use them because they are relatively simple 2D games (by today’s standards) made by small teams. For any large 3D title, multiply the above by 100 e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was 100 devs for 2 years. I’ll leave you to do the maths 🙂

Now maybe you decide that despite the evidence above, you think you can do it. Either on your own, or in a small team. All I can say is good luck to you and your game will probably never see the light of day. It definitely won’t see the light of day in it’s original ‘high concept’ form. It may do if you cut back features, remove areas and make it simpler – but then it’s no longer the big game you envisioned is it?

You may even accept the evidence and decide that despite knowing you will never finish the game it will still be worthwhile for you in terms of development experience. In which case go for it! Why should you be ‘forced’ to have to do several small games instead? Unless you are banking financially on the game being released, why not let your imagination run wild, dive into the big project and come out a couple of years down the line with masses of development experience. Then you can take that experience either into the games industry itself, or into your own smaller titles if you are going indie.

Now if you accept the evidence above and realise that you actually want to release a game in your lifetime, then small games are the way forward for you. Not only do you gain experience of the whole development cycle (as opposed to a seemingly endless mid-cycle grind) you actually get the thrill of releasing a finished game. And maybe some pennies for your efforts to give you the resources to work on the next one.

What you do is of course entirely your choice and a lot will depend on your motivation and your personality. But whatever you do decide, I hope that you are at least no longer heading into it blindly and that the figures above inform your decision.

NB: I do realise that both these titles were the first of their kind on a new piece of hardware and that there are many dev tools and free-to-use assets out there now that take care of a lot of the background work, making 2D RPG and platformer creation far easier than it used to be. However I’m hoping these examples will serve as an eye-opener into the amount of work the titles that inspired us took to create and that it isn’t a trivial matter of ‘knuckling down’ to make our modern homages.

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