I like to play a game called “Angry Birds 2”.
I don’t know where this ranks with video games, but there’s a lot to it.
I was wondering how long it takes to come up with a video game? From the idea to the completed product?
Anything from 48 hours or less (game jams) to years (huge productions).
Modern big-budget video games usually spend 2-4 years in development.
“Video game” is an immensely broad category, spanning from something as simple as monochrome pong or breakout all the way up to first-person shooters utilizing high-quality graphics and non-player characters that exhibit really complex behavior.
I think @DPRK already has the general answer: an astute coder can slap together a crappy-but-playable game in little time at all, but anything with complex graphics and/or gameplay will take a team of developers months or years to polish into something worthy of release.
In the case of the original Angry Birds game, it looks like it went from concept to release in less than a year:
In contrast, the wildly successful Flappy Bird only took “several days”:
What helped is that the physics are based on an earlier game called Crush the Castle. Even if they didn’t actually reverse engineer it they based their own physics engine on how that game plays. Angry Birds became so much more successful because of the characters and the story behind it, even if the gameplay is nearly identical.
There’s other factors like “engine” based games, where the story, characters, gameplay, and even the user interface are just wrappers around the same underlying code. The Unreal Engine, for example, has been around since 1998 and is still used today to streamline development of first-person shooter type games. So yeah there’s not a single answer to the question.
In a sense there is, in that the more complex a game is, the more time it will take. Shy of that, there are too many variables in play to really be able to predict such a thing, at least by the layman. I wouldn’t be surprised if studios have project management stuff to try and forecast that kind of thing.
In the case of “Duke Nukem Forever” it took 14 years…
Star Citizen has been in development for 11 years and counting. There’s pretty wide consensus that they may never deliver anything but accounting irregularities.
[Moderating]
Moving from Factual Questions to the Game Room.
[Not moderating]
It can vary tremendously. Some of the games I’ve enjoyed the most in recent years were developed by a single person (either entirely, or with a handful of others contributing things like the background music). And many of these individual developers have some other regular job, and are making games as a hobby, so the total development time can’t be longer than the free time available to one person.
On the other hand, if you fire up Fable and watch the credits, it literally takes 40 minutes for them to all scroll past. That’s a lot of people to make a game, and even if each of them only played a small part, it really adds up.
Or Star Citizen which is on ten years now (I think) and still under active development.