Team size? Thread

I'm looking into creating a game roughly the size of the old Playstation 1 Final Fantasy games. We will be using UE4. This is my first project of this scale and I'm getting a lot of feed back from one of my team mates saying we need to scale the game down because it's well out of our scope for our team size (we currently have 2 programmers, and one artist/modeler). Obviously we need to grow and I'm ok with that, but the question is how much? None of us are full time game developers so this is what we do in our free time. but we are hoping to change that if this game is a success. I really don't think the game can be expressed correctly on a smaller scale and I'd almost rather not see it done at all then see it done and released far below my standard. I'm looking for a professional opinion from others who have worked on several projects to give me a general idea of how big of a team we would need for this project. Thanks for any feedback!

Being a solo dev, I hope it's still ok if I add my two cents.

If you want things done well, things take way longer than you first expect them to. From the first line of code to the last, making Brink of Extinction took me 2,5 years. Granted, during that time I was also studying, applying for jobs, getting a job and working on some unity assets and other projects, so the actual time spent is probably closer to about 45-50 full time weeks.

So that's the first thing you need to consider - How much time can each team member reasonably put into the project? What is the experience level of the team? When I started out, I had just started coding, just starting modelling, I knew texturing from before. I was new to Unity. You not only need to consider the time each person can put into the project, but also the delay due to learning curves.

You say the scale of FF games on PS1, but I assume more graphically complex. This complexity comes at a price, especially when we're talking, for example, making meshes that don't benefit from learning workflow for a specific type of object. When I started making my turrets and enemies, the time from working on the mesh to having a fully textured object was about 2 days, for the second half of the objects I spent less than a working day per object. However, when you need to manage making things that are completely different, you can't really improve the work flow as much.

If anything, I'd make a rough plan containing the boundaries of the project - How many characters need to be made, how many enemies will the game have, how big will the world be, what kind of systems do we need to program, how many songs does the OST need, how many sounds will we need... Then start setting expected times to completion and only after that start working on something to see how reasonable the expectation is compared to reality.

Also, expanding a team might seem simple, but working well in teams is also difficult, especially on a no-pay hobby level. The larger the team gets, the more likely it is someone stops working, and that affects the entire team and delays thing due to repeated recruitment, loss of work made and new learning curves. Having been on teams before I know this too well, and it almost always happens.

Whenever I read gamedevs wanting to make really large projects I always think they won't finish the project. Having spent a lot of time on the Unity forums I've been correct probably 99,9% of the time. That said, your team could be the 0,1%, so go for it. Worst case scenario is you get some experience out of it, along with objects and code that can probably be used elsewhere. But I'd really recommend taking the feed back from the team mate to heart and make a very strict plan as to how large the project will be. If there's no realistic plan to begin with, you will most likely make it larger than you can manage and it will fail.

So, in short, plan and estimate the needed work effort and you will see if it's doable.

You've got several really good points in there. I will definitely incorporate a lot of this information into my plan.

I would suggest you making few short games before that, size of the team? It depends sometimes Solo Developers make huge hits, some times team of a 100 make screw ups. There is no way to say how many people you will need, I dont know how much your team motivated etc

We do have several smaller games that we will have released before this bigger one is done. But we are trying to get some of the artwork, story, dialogue, and some of the programming framework laid out in between working on those smaller titles. Obviously there isn't a set number that would make sense. I was just looking for an in general answer. From what I'm hearing, it sounds like a team of between 15-20 people should be pretty good as long as we choose our team members wisely.

ethanCodes wrote:

We do have several smaller games that we will have released before this bigger one is done. But we are trying to get some of the artwork, story, dialogue, and some of the programming framework laid out in between working on those smaller titles. Obviously there isn't a set number that would make sense. I was just looking for an in general answer. From what I'm hearing, it sounds like a team of between 15-20 people should be pretty good as long as we choose our team members wisely.

If you choose wiselly its more than enough, keep up

Keep it as small as you can. Big teams and rev share models fail 99% of the time, and you also increase the risk of "free loathers" 8 people working and 2 people not doing anything.

Also remember the legal things regarding your team and the process of making games.

The larger the team, the slower the development will be per person

Edited by: Nightshade

I have five constant freelancers for graphics and sounds, and I do all the coding.

I think it's important to determine what roles are necessary first. That a better approach than just assuming you'll need so many people and then divide the total work by that many people. Each role can do a certain amount of work in a week. They are not all equally paced. That effects your timeline.

Hmmm. I'm curious of the choice of engine for a 2d project. What made you decide to use it?

GameDevSeals wrote:

Hmmm. I'm curious of the choice of engine for a 2d project. What made you decide to use it?

This isn't a 2D project? I never said it was. I said it's similar to the playstation 1 era final fantasy games. Final Fantasy 7, the first released on the PS1, used 3D models, as did all the ones after it.

I agree w/ Correcture's points and would like to add a few more

1) If you're making a lot of progress on the game and it's coming along well, it's always easier to attract more people to help out. People want to be a part of a project that will actually get done and is cool.

2) If you're making a big project, really think in terms of what is the smallest amount of work we can to so that people can start playing / testing the game. For example, it's better to work on just getting one level right and then moving on rather than splitting your time between multiple levels. Or, only work on having the bare minimum amount of weapons / powerups / whatever to just test the game. It's always easy to add more of this stuff at the end. I've found people will instead start with these cool things like brainstorming epic levels, cool weapons, abilities, etc.

Cheers,

Dave

Thanks for the input Dave! Incase anyone is interested, I actually want to make this game so badly, but want to make sure that it is done right, so I have temporarily shelved it, and started my own game studio. It's currently just me but I've got an artist and programmer coming on soon. We'll be working on a small arkanoid-like game with some space invaders and RPG elements. My plan is to work on a few smaller games, increasing in scale over the next few years. During this period we will continue to grow our team to ensure that we have a solid team of people who can work well together. Eventually, we hope to get established enough that we can stop working part time from home and make this our full time job. At that point, we would have one or two small teams doing smaller games to continue to bring in income, while the bigger team begins work on my bigger project. If anyone is interested in keeping up with our work, you can check us out at darkrabbitstudio.com or facebook.com/darkrabbitstudiosllc !

No worries. Why did you pick the Arkanoid game?

DaveMApplegate wrote:

No worries. Why did you pick the Arkanoid game?

I just decided I wanted to go with something simple to start with, but also something I could make some cool changes to to bring a fresh new approach to that style of game. I thought about several other types of games, but I've always liked Arkanoid and I quickly thought up a ton of different design choices. Some of them I'll implement, some of them may not be used. But I've got a lot of ideas not just for gameplay, but also to keep people interested in it beyond just playing a few levels and throwing it away. Hopefully I'm right and people enjoy it when it's done!

I agree with some other members that for your first game keep the team as small as you are able while still ensuring you have coverage on all the important areas. However, don't just saddle someone with 4 different jobs and expect them to be able to perform to the best of their ability ... make sure that you get the right people for the right position and don't overwhelm with too much responsibility from the get go.