Game Development Question

Dibs

You know those flash (?) games on free websites and others where you do menial tasks repeatedly and progress to doing a bunch of menial tasks at the same time? The goal is to continuing doing these things to gain points/money to progress to having to do more things at a time.

i.e. feeding fish, making food in a fast food restaurant, maybe watering plants?

Terrible explanation, I know.

My question is: how much time/effort/money would need to go into one of these things, and what platform would they be developed on? I'm looking into possibly making one as a marketing tool, but I really don't know the first thing about game development -- just how to beat 'em.

Any advice is really appreciated.

Nova_C

As far as I understand Flash, you need to buy the dev kit in order to create Flash games or animations:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flash.html

I don't think it comes cheap.

Demerdar

You have any programming experience? That certainly helps. I'm sure you'll also need to know how to manage databases (is SQL still around.. lol?) so you can keep track of each persons individual "stats". I mean, I can't imagine it would be all that difficult if you had the necessary skills and tools available for you to do so.

Technicality

I do this sort of thing for a living. I'd say if you had a team of four people that knew what it was doing comprised of:
-Game programmer
-Web developer
-Artist/Animator x 2

At a rough guess you could put together something of very limited scope in 2 weeks. It would probably take more like 4 weeks for something with a bit of substance. If you don't know exactly what you want before you start this probably will increase considerably. You can do it with less people and overlap jobs but the time will go up, unless the game is very light on art/animation/web presence.

Hope that gives you a rough idea of the time/effort involved. If you are paying people to make it you can estimate cost from there, if not buying flash and paying for hosting will be your only unavoidable expenses.

Dibs

Appreciate the responses.

1) I'm not looking to do this myself. I have the idea, but I'd leave it to more experienced people to flesh it out and implement.

2) It's a really large, global company. Hosting wouldn't be an issue, and I imagine what we would do is contract out a small software company to develop it? Is that how things would normally work? Present what we want to this software firm, then they create the product and we put it on our website?

1 month for a finished product is pretty good. What's the cost like? $10k, $50k, $100k?

NotYou

I've done this professionally.

1 month is not do-able. Maybe for someone doing their own thing, and cutting corners where they want and playing to their strengths, but not in a business relationship where the goal is to create what the client wants.

Well to clarify, of course "something" can be created in 1 month. But will it be fun? Will it hit your goals? Will it function on facebook?

The cost of hiring someone to make a flash game can vary greatly both in time and cost.

Take this for example: http://apps.facebook.com/castlesmash/

I didn't make it, but I know one of the people who did. A small team of a few people. It took them 9 months. They had a lot of trouble with the facebook functionality apparently as it was their first time working with it.

It's really hard to tell you how long something would take and cost without seeing a full game design doc. You can also outsource these sorts of things to India for very cheap. I once got a game for 1k. It didn't really work, and they spoke terrible english, but it was pretty cheap.

3 months sounds like a solid amount of time for most simple games. If you hire a firm, that's not cheap. If you hire a single talented individual, that's still not cheap because a lot of those guys make 100k a year off their freelance work.