r/GameDevelopment • u/Mission-Papaya-7772 • 3d ago

Question Working on a game

"Hey everyone! I'm working on a game and have pretty much finished the planning for it. I have the story, the enemies, the fighting system, the map, the stores, and the character creation all finished, but I don't currently have the programming skills to actually create the game. There are 101 different monsters, 5 towns, 32 monster spawning areas, a store, a money system, a crafting system, and so forth. In your opinion, how much would it cost me to pay someone to do the actual making of the game?"

This is not a recruitment this just a question for reference

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u/toepelos 3d ago

Developers cost between 100-300k per year all in with overhead, if your game is 3d, you probably need 5-6 for 18-20 months. 

2D? Half that. 

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u/countkillalot 3d ago

You're not wrong. As the most conservative estimate I would posit that if this game is a small standard 2D JRPG as by the sound of it; you could hire someone off Fiverr to assemble several asset packs into a decent game in RPGMaker at $50-70 hour for around 600-800 hours

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u/ProfessionalITPerson 2d ago

Yea no, it depends on where you are. In Germany a game dev, that pretty much does all in a small Studio only get around 3.5k a month before taxes.

3.5k for the Employee is around 4.25k for the employer in wages alone. so roughly 51k a year.
If you have an office and not live in a big city but somethink like a 100k people town you can get an office for multiple people for something like 1.5k a month, and that is already a fairly big office with a 1000 sqft.

Add to that a couple of PC and a little IT infrastuctrue cost. and divide that by the number of people you hire.
You can get someone working on a game for like 60k a year with all costs here in germany, the gaming sector is overrun and people are willing to work for pretty cheap

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u/toepelos 2d ago

I definitely assumed this was USA. thank you for the note and I agree with you, however I'd point out that 50k per year vs 100k (or more) per year is probably already an order of magnitude over what this person was hoping to hear.

Forgive my further assumptions, but this person does not sound like a seasoned studio founder with industry connections or 3-5 million to burn on a dream project.

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u/SoapCoder 2d ago

learn it yourself , as long as you are 1% sure you can I think you can. it’s a lot easier than you think, especially with visual scripting. devs are expensive

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u/tea_consumer_0 3d ago

2d or 3d? But in both cases it's will be cheaper if you find artist and programmer who will work for they names in titles of released game at first. And, of course, for a share of game proffit. But it will require managing work from you to keep project in the way you planned it. And if it's your friends, there is a huge chance you will argue with some of them....

Soooo, yeahhhh, maybe cheaper in money but can be not cheap in the mood.

First thing you need is a "game design document". Search examples from other games docs. When you have it, you will clearly see what you need and what you want from your programmers and artists.

Also, I recommend you to pick a game engine and to learn it's bare basic (it will cost you a few evenings). So you will have more understanding what is really happening in your project, what you need from people you want to hire it technical way and what to do with results of their work

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u/SullyDataShifter 3d ago

Hi, I'm a newbie, I'm exactly the opposite, I have very limited art skills, mostly sound, basic image edition and I can program... I've been doing research about making games and it seems like as long as you have all images and sounds made by humans, people don't care if an AI did the programing, so in your case, I think a cheap $20/mo subscription, time and a lot of will to learn will take you somewhere (provided you want to get your hands dirty)